Hi Brym Stone,
Thanks for brought up the issue here!  A few comments and suggestions to answer your questions…


The Coral mPCIe module should be able to just plug into any mPCIe slot, so I think the issue isn’t the physical half-height for the card but rather the mother board supports the standard mPCIe interface.  The module has been mostly used by industrial PCs and controllers, and we have not received any complaints about the compatibility or lack of support on those platforms. That being said, there might be some issues with the personal computers for home use, and that is also likely highly dependent on the vendor or brand of your PC.  To resolved this specific issue for you, please contact our customer support team directly at coral-support@google.com, and our filed engineering team can help you look at the possible solutions.  Please provide the brand and model number of your PC or the motherboard, and whatever the system configuration you have.


The dual-EdgeTPU M.2 module was originally designed for one of the special business product that required dual PCIe buses, and unfortunately, vast majority of the system board vendors have not implemented this standard so far. So this is really not we built something to be difficult to use, but due to the slow or lack of the adoption by host board vendors to support the dual PCIe bus standard, which isn’t something we can control.  It’s possible for making a dual-EdgeTPU module to work with the current single-PCIe bus host boards, by creating a M.2 module that uses an extra switch chip for the dual Edge TPUs, and we have discussed this with some host board vendors, and they are looking into to offer a product with this solution. But until that is done, most of the current host boards will not work with the dual-EdgeTPU M.2 module.


That being said, there are a few industry controller vendors who have products that supports the dual PICe buses. For example, Nexcom has a NDiS B537 box that supports the Coral module.
In any case, for you to use home PC (or laptop) with a Coral module, one easy alternative is to use the Coral USB module, as this module has the on-bard chip that enables USB3 interface speed if your PC supports USB3, which will get you similar performance to the PCIe bus.
But please feel free to contact our support using the email above if you wish to discuss further and explore more solution options in using the Coral products with your PC.  Thank you for your interests in using Coral!
Bill Luan
Coral Team