Development Computer Setup

Install alwaysAI

The first step to using the alwaysAI platform is to install alwaysAI on your development computer. If you are using Windows or MacOS use the appropriate installer to install both the alwaysAI Command-Line Interface (CLI) and the desktop application. For Linux users follow the instructions to install the CLI.

The alwaysAI desktop software includes everything you need to create alwaysAI computer vision applications and train your own computer vision model on your development host.



To verify that the alwaysAI CLI is fully installed and accessible, open a Powershell terminal and run:

$ aai -v

This should print a version string like 0.5.30.

Note: WSL and WSL 2 are not currently supported. Both do not have access to HW devices such as cameras and USB peripherals such as the Intel NCS2. Powershell is our recommended terminal on Windows.

OpenSSH

Note: You can skip this step if you don’t plan to install on a remote device.

OpenSSH is a suite of secure networking utilities based on the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol. The alwaysAI CLI relies on OpenSSH for connecting to your edge device and related tasks like key generation. To check if your computer has OpenSSH installed already, open a terminal and enter:

$ ssh -V

This should print a version string like OpenSSH_7.9p1, LibreSSL 2.7.3. As of late 2018, Windows 10 supports OpenSSH out of the box. Check out this article on the Microsoft docs site for more information on installing OpenSSH on Windows.

Node.js

Node.js is an open-source cross-platform JavaScript run-time environment. To check if your development computer has Node.js installed already, open a terminal and enter:

$ node -v

This should print a version string like v12.5.0. The alwaysAI CLI requires Node.js v8.0.0 or greater and npm v5.0.0 or greater. Node.js ships with npm, a package manager that we’ll use to install the alwaysAI CLI.

To install Node.js, visit https://nodejs.org/ and follow the instructions for your operating system.

alwaysAI CLI

To install the alwaysAI CLI, open a terminal on your development machine and run:

$ sudo npm install --global alwaysai

Enter your user’s operating system password when prompted.

To verify that the alwaysAI CLI is fully installed and accessible, run:

$ aai -v

This should print a version string like 0.5.30.

OpenSSH

Note: You can skip this step if you don’t plan to install on a remote device.

OpenSSH is a suite of secure networking utilities based on the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol. The alwaysAI CLI relies on OpenSSH for connecting to your edge device and related tasks like key generation. To check if your computer has OpenSSH installed already, open a terminal and enter:

$ ssh -V

This should print a version string like OpenSSH_7.9p1, LibreSSL 2.7.3. Most Linux distributions already have OpenSSH installed out of the box.

Docker

Note: You can skip this step if you don’t plan to install locally on your development machine.

The edgeIQ runtime is is available in the alwaysAI edgeIQ docker images. To run an alwaysAI application on your Linux host machine, follow instructions specific to your OS. In order for the alwaysAI CLI to run docker, you'll need to add the "docker" group to your user:

$ sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Once you've done that, test your docker installation with:

$ docker run hello-world

The alwaysAI desktop software includes everything you need to create alwaysAI computer vision applications and train your own computer vision model on your development host.

*Supports Intel and Apple Silicon.



To verify that the alwaysAI CLI is fully installed and accessible, open a terminal and run:

$ aai -v

This should print a version string like 0.5.30.

OpenSSH

Note: You can skip this step if you don’t plan to install on a remote device.

OpenSSH is a suite of secure networking utilities based on the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol. The alwaysAI CLI relies on OpenSSH for connecting to your edge device and related tasks like key generation. To check if your computer has OpenSSH installed already, open a terminal and enter:

$ ssh -V

This should print a version string like OpenSSH_7.9p1, LibreSSL 2.7.3. Although MacOS has OpenSSH installed out of the box, you can update or re-install it with package managers such as Homebrew.

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