Basic Installation and Configuration

This page provides guidance for installing the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute SDK (Intel® Movidius™ NCSDK).

Prerequisites

Compatible neural compute device (like the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick)
Git
Development computer with a supported OS:
- x86-64 with Ubuntu (64 bit) 16.04 Desktop
- Raspberry Pi 3 with Raspbian Stretch (starting with SDK 1.09.xx)
  - Upgrade Raspbian Jessie to Stretch
- Other operating environments (with supported OS):
- Internet connection
- USB camera (optional, needed for some examples)

Installation

To perform the typical installation of the NCSDK, use the following command on your host machine:

git clone -b ncsdk2 http://github.com/Movidius/ncsdk && cd ncsdk && make install

The -b ncsdk2 option checks out the latest version of NCSDK 2 from the ncsdk2 branch. If you omit this option you will install the NCSDK version on the master branch, which is currently NCSDK 1.x.

Warning: Upgrading from NCSDK 1.x to NCSDK 2.x If you currently have NCSDK 1.x installed and you are installing NCSDK 2.x, the Neural Compute API (NCAPI) will be upgraded from v1 to v2. NCAPI v2 is not backwards-compatible with NCAPI v1 (i.e. programs written with NCAPI v1 will not compile or run with NCAPI v2). However, all of your NCAPI v1 files will be moved to /opt/movidius/ncsdk1.

For more information about NCAPI changes, see the Neural Compute API overview.

Important: Caffe Users: If you are installing on a host machine that already has Caffe installed and its directory is already in the PYTHONPATH environment variable, you must remove the existing Caffe directory from the PYTHONPATH environment variable prior to installing the NCSDK. You will need to manually modify the PYTHONPATH to match your development needs such that it points to the Caffe version installed with the NCSDK when using the NCSDK and it points to other Caffe versions when you wish to use those.

Important: The installation will only set the PYTHONPATH environment variable for the current user. It will do so by modifying the .bashrc file for that user. To use the NCSDK as another user on the host machine you will need to manually set the PYTHONPATH for that user.

Raspberry Pi Installation

We recommend a 16GB SD card for a full NCSDK installation.

You will likely need to increase the swapfile size on the Raspberry Pi in order to successfully complete NCSDK and/or OpenCV installation. To increase the swapfile size, edit the value of CONF_SWAPSIZE in /etc/dphys-swapfile:

sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile

The default value is 100 (MB). We recommend that you change this to 1024 (MB) or greater.

Then restart the swapfile service:

sudo /etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile restart

Proceed with installation as shown above. After you have installed the NCSDK (and optionally OpenCV), you should change the swapfile size back to 100 MB.

Uninstallation

To uninstall the NCSDK, type the following command:

make uninstall