Revolutionizing Edge AI: An In-Depth Look at the Raspberry Pi 5 and the Hailo-8L AI Kit

The landscape of single-board computing (SBC) underwent a seismic shift with the release of the Raspberry Pi 5. While the jump in CPU and GPU performance was significant, the most transformative addition was the integrated PCIe 2.0 interface. This small connector opened the door to high-speed hardware expansion that was previously impossible. Chief among these expansions is the Raspberry Pi AI Kit, featuring the Hailo-8L M.2 AI accelerator. Often referred to in the community alongside various M.2 HATs (Hardware Attached on Top), this combination—frequently dubbed the “Hailo+HAT” setup—has effectively turned the Raspberry Pi into a professional-grade edge AI deployment tool.

The Genesis of the Hailo-Pi Partnership

For years, the Raspberry Pi was a platform for learning and light automation. When it came to Artificial Intelligence, specifically Computer Vision (CV), the Pi relied on its ARM-based CPU to crunch numbers. This resulted in “slideshow” frame rates; a Pi 4 might manage 2 or 3 frames per second (FPS) running a modern object detection model like YOLO (You Only Look Once).

External USB accelerators, like the Intel Movidius, offered a temporary fix but were often bottlenecked by USB latency and driver instability. The Raspberry Pi 5 changed the game by allowing a direct “brain-to-brain” connection via PCIe. By partnering with Hailo—an Israeli chipmaker specializing in Neural Processing Units (NPUs)—Raspberry Pi provided a native, high-bandwidth solution that makes AI processing as seamless as plugging in a keyboard.