I have dabbled in model edge processing like Efficientnet and YOLO on Hailo platform.

Raspberry Pi and its AI HAT+ seems to be the most accessible, often others can easily pick it up the basics and get up and running without much trouble even without experience.

I wonder if there is any alternative? Raspberry Pi 5 + the 26 TOPS HAT+ is not cheap.

What Raspberry Pi is to Broadcom (developer-friendly SBCs), Beagleboard is to TI.

It's a slightly different approach -- Beagleboard is a non-profit and emphasizes openly purchasable components. But similar in that it is the cheapest way to tinker with SoCs from that vendor.

BeagleY-AI has 4 TOPS for ~$70. AI inference tooling is still improving but I've been working on it here: https://docs.beagleboard.org/boards/beagley/ai/demos/using-e...

> I wonder if there is any alternative? Raspberry Pi 5 + the 26 TOPS HAT+ is not cheap.

Combined they're like $250? Not expensive.

On the other hand, at that price maybe you ought to get a Jetson Orin Nano.