What’s the best way to run the Piccolo AI server locally?

Technical Discussion
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Is there any step-by-step documentation on how to install, run and test the server on a local machine?

2

Piccolo AI™

Piccolo AI is the open-source version of SensiML Analytics Studio intended for individual developers, researchers, and AI enthusiasts. For enterprise teams contact SensiML for a licensed enterprise version of the software.

The Piccolo AI project includes

  • SensiML’s ML Engine: The engine behind SensiML’s AutoML model building, sensor data management, model tracking, and embedded firmware generation
  • Embedded ML SDK: SensiML’s Inferencing and DSP SDK designed for building and running DSP & ML pipelines on edge devices
  • Analytic Studio UI: An Intuitive web interface for working with the SensiML ML Engine to build TinyML applications
  • SensiML Python Client: Allows programmatic access to the REST API services through Jupyter Notebooks

Piccolo AI is currently optimized for the classification of time-series sensor data. Common use cases enabled by Piccolo AI include:

  • Acoustic Event Detection
  • Activity Recognition
  • Gesture Detection
  • Anomaly Detection
  • Keyword Spotting
  • Vibration Classification

To learn more about Piccolo AI features and capabilities, see the product page.

Get Started

The simplest way to get started learning and using the features in Piccolo AI is to sign up for an account on SensiML’s managed SaaS service at SensiML Free Trial.

If you prefer to install and manage Piccolo AI yourself, you can get the latest version on github.

Run Piccolo AI Locally

To try out Piccolo AI on your machine, we recommend using Docker.

Prerequisites

  • Install and start docker and docker-compose - Docker Engine overview | Docker Docs
  • Note: Windows users will need to use the wsl2 backend. Follow the instructions here
  • Note: If using Docker Desktop go to Preferences > Resources > Advanced and set Memory to at least 12GB.
  • Follow the post-installation instructions as well to avoid having to run docker commands as sudo user
  • Some functionality requires calling docker from within docker. To enable this, you will need to make the docker socket accessible to docker containers
sudo chmod 666 /var/run/docker.sock

By default the repository does not include docker images to generate model/compiler code for devices. You must pull docker images for the compilers you want to use. See docker images:

docker pull sensiml/sml_x86_generic:9.3.0-v1.0
docker pull sensiml/sml_armgcc_generic:10.3.1-v1.0
docker pull sensiml/sml_x86mingw_generic:9.3-v1.0
docker pull sensiml/sensiml_tensorflow:0a4bec2a-v4.0

Start Piccolo AI

  • Make sure docker is running by checking your system tray icons. If it is not running then open Docker Desktop application in Windows to start the docker background service.
  • Open a Ubuntu terminal through Windows Subsystem for Linux
  • Navigate to your piccolo directory
cd /mnt/c/Users/my_user/Documents/Repos/piccolo

Run docker compose

docker-compose up

Note: You should have the latest version of the sensiml base docker image. If not, you can do a docker pull

docker pull sensiml/base

Login via the Piccolo UI

Go to your browser at http://localhost:8000 to log in to the UI. See the Getting Started Guide to get started.

The default username and password is stored in the src/server/datamanager/fixtures/default.yaml file

username: piccolo@sensiml.com
password: TinyML4Life