balena-io-examples/coral-streaming-object-detector

This project is a classic 'hello world' or starter kit for the balena ecosystem. With only 36 stars over nearly six years and zero recent activity, it functions as a stale documentation artifact rather than a living software project. It offers no proprietary algorithms, instead wrapping Google's standard MobileNet-SSD TFLite model for the Coral TPU. Defensibility is nearly zero as the logic is a thin wrapper around the 'libcoral' and 'pycoral' libraries. From a competitive standpoint, it has been largely superseded by more robust edge AI frameworks like Frigate (for NVR use cases), NVIDIA DeepStream (for high-performance pipelines), or even newer Balena-native blocks. Frontier labs and hardware manufacturers (Google, NVIDIA, Apple) have moved toward integrated SDKs that make this type of manual orchestration unnecessary for most developers. The platform risk is absolute: the project exists only to support the Balena platform, and any shift in Balena's architecture or Google's Coral support renders this repo obsolete.