kneron plus use

jingyuan

after I get the .nef files, how to use the kneron plus or what is the next step to begin my test with the kl720 device? 

Maria Chen

Hi Jingyuan,

May you explain the issue more? Where are the .nef files from? If you'd like to use Kneron PLUS, you could download it here:

https://www.kneron.com/en/support/developers/

And you could install the dependencies here. A guide of how to run programs in Kneron PLUS is also in this documentation:

Install Dependency - Document Center (kneron.com)

Build Kneron PLUS - Document Center

jingyuan

Thank you for your reply. I have a pretrained model and its form is .onnx, so I compiled it by the kenron tool chain, then I get the .nef file.

Here are my questions:

1. what is firmware and what is its function?
2. should I update the nef file to the kl720 device's flash through kneron DFUT?
3. from the documents, I see that I need to make new ncpu firmware and scpu firmware and use cmake to get the .exe files. I wonder what are the sequence of the steps and how do those files work with together.

Maria Chen

Hi Jingyuan,

1. Firmware is something that could be uploaded onto your KL520/KL720 device. When you run Kneron PLUS example programs, the software sets the parameters and tells the firmware to continue with the inferencing, and the firmware communicates with the hardware (KL520/KL720 chip) to do inferencing. The results are sent back to the firmware, and to the software so you could see them.

2. This discussion section is for KL520, so you could ask KL720-related questions in the KL720 section next time. In KL720's case, you could upload the model (.nef file) in different ways, which are listed here: Write Model To Flash - Document Center (kneron.com)

If you were running Kneron PLUS example programs, the models are placed in kneron_plus/res/models. If you took a look at a KL720 example program, such as kl720_demo_generic_image_inference.c, you could see that the model path is specified:

When you run this program, the model will be loaded to the device, so you could try doing this for your model too.

To answer your question, if you are using KL720 USB dongle or KL720 board with USB connector, then yes, you could update the .nef file to the KL720 device's flash as well.

3. If you'd like to test your own .nef file's performance, you could refer to the [kl520/kl720]_demo_generic_[image/data]_inference program (available in both C and Python) in Kneron PLUS example and edit it so that you can run the program using your own model without editing the firmware.