TinyML Study Session Two

February 22, 2026

As part of my efforts to upskill in the areas of embedded systems and edge computing, I’m taking keen interest in the (generously free) Machine Learning Systems textbook and the hands on labs therein.

In particular, I’m working with the Seeed XIAOML Kit.

Last time I found that I couldn’t get the XIAO_ESP32S3 board manager to work in the Arduino IDE to work so I resported to using the PlatformIO extension within VSCode. I found the source of the problem; I had inadvertantly been trying to install the board manager over my hotspot, so the download kept stalling out. Once I swapped to my wifi, the downlaod worked right away and I was able to run the board via the Arduino IDE.

This was good, because one of the bottlenecks I was encountering was that I wasn’t able to find a suitable serial plotter in PlatformIO to test the mic on the XIAO_ESP32S3 board. And more generally, it’s good to have consistency between environment in the tutorial I’m following and the environment that I have available.

So far I’ve conducted three tests in the new environment.

(1) The blink test:

(2) The display test:

(3) The microphone test:

I’ll continue on from there next time.