You’ve stopped dreaming and started building. Excellent. Moving a machine vision application from a powerful cloud server or a desktop GPU to a tiny, power-constrained AI System-on-Module (AI SoM)  at the edge is the ultimate engineering challenge. This isn't just a matter of shrinking components; it's about making deliberate, foundational decisions that determine your product’s real-world performance, longevity, and cost. This guide acts as your foundational checklist—a prac