When you first look at the Shrike board, you see two chips — a microcontroller and an FPGA. What you don't immediately see is the 8-line bus that connects them on the PCB. This bus is, in many ways, the most important part of the board. Without it, you
In our previous YOLO blog post, we walked through the entire journey of getting YOLOv8 and YOLO11 object detection running on the Vicharak Axon; from ONNX export, to post-processing node removal, to RKNN conversion, to finally running inference on the NPU. If you haven't read that one yet,
There’s a strange tension in how we think about AI. We’re uneasy about it “taking over the world,” yet quietly impatient for that future to arrive because managing calendars, replying to messages, staying active on Slack, and making everyday decisions is already exhausting. We joke about wanting a
When people first hear the word FPGA, it often sounds intimidating—something abstract, complex, and very different from CPUs or microcontrollers. In reality, an FPGA is built from a small number of simple digital blocks, repeated many times and connected together in a programmable way. In this log , we’ll
If you've ever tried running a state-of-the-art object detection model on an edge device, you know the feeling. You start with excitement, "This will be amazing!", then hit a wall of incompatible frameworks, cryptic errors, and models that just won't cooperate with your hardware.
FPGA-based ML acceleration looks straightforward on paper: implement convolution, add parallel MAC units, stream data, and achieve high TOPS/W. But once a design moves beyond small demos and begins running real models at real resolutions, the engineering challenges shift dramatically. The bottleneck is rarely compute alone. Instead, it becomes
The Shrike Lite board by Vicharak is a unique hybrid development platform combining the RP2040 microcontroller with a Renesas Forge FPGA (1120 LUTs) on a single low-cost board. This makes it ideal for projects that mix software control with hardware-level timing precision, such as driving addressable WS2812 LED strips (a.
A Single-Board Computer, or SBC, refers to a computer that has a microprocessor, memory, as well as all input/output peripherals, all of which are embedded on a single PCB, or Printed Circuit Board. This means that, unlike traditional PCs, wherein you replace components such as RAM or a GPU,
Design defies a single definition. It exists at the crossroads of logic and taste; it is as difficult to explain as it is to understand. So what might seem great to one might seem equally ridiculous to another. “I don’t care about design”. Something many of us have heard
At Vicharak, we spend a lot of time thinking about the layers of abstraction that engineers live in. We all started with Arduino. You write digitalWrite(LED, HIGH), and the light turns on. It feels like magic. But it is "Software 1.0" magic. Under the hood, there