Bear or Rabbit? On-Device AI Garden Monitoring with Raspberry Pi and Soracom

At Soracom Discovery, our annual IoT conference in Tokyo, we regularly invite engineers and developers to create and exhibit prototype demonstrations using Soracom connectivity. At this year’s show, I showcased a garden monitoring system designed to identify any animals popping into my garden, and react accordingly. When something dangerous approaches, say a bear, the system sounds a warning buzzer, while harmless creatures like rabbits and squirrels can come and go.

In this article, I’ll walk through how it works, the one architecture decision that mattered most (running the AI on the device rather than in the cloud), and how we use Soracom to keep the deployed system updatable – including retraining the model after it’s already in the field.