What in the article made this sound like a complex application to you? It seemed to me like any number of vanilla NN's could have done the job as simple image

What in the article made this sound like a complex application to you? It seemed to me like any number of vanilla NN's could have done the job as simple image classification tasks like these have been done successfully for decades. TensorFlow was chosen because he found out about it via Alpha Go, so Google's marketing is doing it's job. Given the man's embedded systems background, it seems entirely plausible that he could have designed and implemented the entire solution himself. (for most people, the 'hard' part of integrating the NN into the real world via the rpi would likely have been relatively easy for him given his experience.) While I generally tend to be cynical about most success stories, this one actually sounds pretty reasonable.