Donkey car project using NCS

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Excerpts from @wheatgrinder's posts on https://ncsforum.movidius.com/discussion/356/steps-for-installtion-for-raspberry-pi-3-new-sdk

Excerpt from https://ncsforum.movidius.com/discussion/comment/1387/#Comment_1387

@AshwinVijayakumar on your advice I tried a buck converter and it seems to be working a treat. I was struggling with the NCS and my other pi peripherals(an LCD screen) causing low power throttling.. this seems to have completely fixed it. I used this device: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XRDV49T/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Here is a video of my car running

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nTZQC-Ayps

Car driving my neural network on the pi, the NCS is doing object detection (not really affecting the car driving yet)

In regards to using the built in ECS for power. My ESC returns 6v on the BEC to drive servos. Almost just right, but I worried that there wasn't enough difference between the BEC 6v and 5.2v needed for the pi for a buck device to work well. All the specs I read seems to require at least 1.5v difference. I would like to try it anyway as more regulation is probably a good thing (filtering out high freqency noise etc) Im no electronics expert for sure.. maybe I should just use a resistor to drop that .5v from the BEC? suggestions? Oh, and to be clear, I'm using the Micro USB port for power IN on the pi, as I assumed there was probably some useful filtering\buffering\regulating or whatever going on on that input. Was that a reasonable thought?

Excerpt from https://ncsforum.movidius.com/discussion/comment/1343/#Comment_1343

I just wanted to report back that I have been very successful at getting the NCS running on my PI. I have googlenet inference and tinyyolo examples working. I am integrating this into my autonomous RC car. (donkeycar)

Here is the google net

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxBc8qEopEo

Here is tinyyolo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZebjXaS1mU&t=64s

My issue is with powering the Pi with the NCS plugged in. Its very sensitive. I frequently end up with the pi throttling due to low voltage. Any suggestions for powering the NCS on a mobile platform via battery?

FYI: I'm using the 'vcgencmd get_throttled' command to check.

In this video you can see the throttling when connected to battery power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xLSnuHUNd4

Here is plugged into wall power adapter, no throttling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkrtntAe5E

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@wheatgrinder, please keep us posted on your progress, and feel free to reach out if you need more help. Let us know when you have integrated autonomous driving into the NCS.

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Thanks for breaking this out to a new thread. Currently the driving model is running on the pi not the NCS. My current effort is to do object detection on the NCS which will be additional input into the driving model. I may put that on the back burner and port the donkeycar drive model to run on the NCS to see if it can be done and if there is any advantage to do doing so.