Most people think of a BrightSign player as a thing that plays - you load it with content, point it at a screen, and it pushes pixels. And yeah, if you’ve ever wired an RTSP camera feed into one, you know it’s a perfectly nice way to throw a live camera (or a few) on a wall. But that’s selling the box way short. There’s an NPU sitting in there, idle, and it can watch the room back.
I wanted a cheap, low-power, always-on person detector. Of course, I’m building this on a BrightSign XT5 player (more on that later). But since a friend said he was using a Beelink SER9 with a AMD Ryzen AI NPU (~50 TOPS) I thought I’d check it out. Can it actually run the detector? Short answer, as of today: no — and the reason is not the part you’d expect.
I’ve written before about what a BrightSign extension actually is and about why edge AI has to run locally on signage. This post is the “show, don’t tell” follow-up. If you want to see what all that theory looks like as a running, watchable thing, there’s exactly one place to start: Argus.