Replace PI with Jetson

#1

Anyone had success replacing the Raspberry Pi with an Nvidia Jetson Nano?

#2

Hi @DorianGre,

We did a demo of a Deep Neural Net based bottle follower with a Jetson Nano. (https://twitter.com/UbiquityR/status/1121216618665660416)

This was a Jetson in addition to the Pi, connected via ethernet. In general this is our recommended configuration, as there are some Pi specific things (like sonar) on the Magni.

There were a couple unresolved issues with the Jetson, but we were working with early hardware and software so things have likely changed:

  • There is a power up sequencing issue that means that the Jetson will not boot when the Magni turns on. They have a new hardware rev now, so maybe they fixed this.

  • We had some serial port issues communicating to the Magni motor controller directly, but

  • The Raspberry Pi Camera wouldn’t work with the Jetson. This is something that is supposed to work, so it was likely due to early software bugs.

If anyone has tried it since, I would love to know what your experience was.

Rohan

#3

Thanks for the link. Do you have a schematic for how you wired this together? Were you just offloading image processing decisions to the Jetson and then sending the results back to the Pi over the wire?

#4

Hey @DorianGre,

Don’t have a schematic handy. Both the Jetson and the Pi were running ROS, and the Jetson had a node that subscribed to the image topic and published a /cmd_vel. The Pi was running the motor_node and publishing images.

In a more ideal setup the camera would have been connected directly to the Jetson, as that would allow us to run at a higher frame rate with a lower latency.

Rohan

#5

OK. Thanks for the info. I think realsense camera connected directly to the Jetson is the way we want to go. Eth to the Pi and go from there I guess.

#6

We had also been doing some mechanical changes that we were thinking would be useful to secure a Jetson Nano in the Magni as the main host CPU.

When the Raspberry Pi 4 came out (quite by surprised) we decided due to issues described by Rohan in this thread and mechanical issues that we should work on usage of the Pi 4 prior to revisiting the issues with use of the jetson nano. The Pi 4 offers quite a boost over the Pi 3 and is a natural fit for the Magni.

Your thoughts on the realsense camera sound like a great way to go, good luck and please let us know if you find any solutions to the issues Rohan has discussed, particularly the serial connect and any Nvidia solution to allow power-up/boot to be automatic.

#7

I don’t have a Magni, so I can’t speak to that directly. I do have a Jetson Nano that we are using with some home-built robotics. It’s proven to be pretty solid, but not head and shoulders above a Pi4 unless you are using the GPU features.