Teaching Rocks to Think

When we last left off, my server was looking a little something like this.

It had just endured a brain transplant, and the Coral AI accelerator was sitting on top of it just waiting to do some thinking.

How well did those rocks think? Not well at all, sadly. Due to what I can only surmise is a bad case of bit-rot, I wasn't able to get the USB Coral to actually do much of anything. It just refused to bootstrap itself into being a Coral. Very disappointing.

But I wasn't going to just leave things at that. If USB wouldn't work, perhaps M.2 would?

Luckily I happened to find one in stock, and after a few day's sailing across the pacific, it made its way from China to the land of freedom and opportunity.

What didn't arrive, however, was the correct screw I needed in order to mount it to my motherboard. Luckily Amazon exists, and so that problem was solved relatively easily.

Well, sort of. It turned out that I needed not just a screw, but in fact a standoff as well. I ended up installing it with just the screw for the time being, and ordered a different pack of fasteners so I could swap in the proper hardware afterwards.

It's fine, don't worry about it.

So how well did these new rocks think? Also not particularly well. But, after a bit of poking and prodding and patching the driver to actually compile and fixing up some weird permissions issues I did finally manage to get it to do its thing.

But it's still not very smart.

(The thumbnails are rotated 90 degrees because I have that camera mounted sideways).