BATC Forum

There seems to be much doom and gloom about the availability of the NVIDIA Jetson Nano (the latest must-have Raspberry Pi clone on steriods with an hardware H265 encoder).

In fact it is easily available direct from NVIDIA for £101.50 including VAT and delivery. https://developer.nvidia.com/buy-jetson ... ocation=GB

I ordered one yesterday and it arrived today.

Dave, G8GKQ

PS This does not mean that it will be supported by the Portsdown software!!

That's where I got mine - excellent service. Glad to hear you are supporting it in Portsdown. Evariste has developed some scripts that allow it to be used with a camera or UDP input. Work in progress but very encouraging.

You are a little behind the curve though - the latest toy is the LimeNet Micro which is based on the Raspberry PI compute module and integrates it with a LIMESDR.

Mike

If anyone is interested NVIDIA have posted the first of their Webinars on the Nano.

https://info.nvidia.com/hello-ai-world- ... 0006098214
It is mainly an overview of using it for AI the bit about the codecs is about 2/3rds of the way in.

I was interested to see that with a different carrier board it can support multiple cameras
and PCIe slots.

The next Webinar will be about JetBot (how to turn it into an autonomous vehicle).

- Charles

With hardware H.264/265 encoder/decoder and CUDA cores for NVENC the Jetson should be an ideal board for the Portsdown.. Unfortunately it has a few issues that need to be overcome.
I did also consider the Turing Pi cluster as an alternative, giving more processing power etc, but it way beyond my current knowledge level to be able to program a cluster to run the application.

G8GKQ wrote: ↑

Thu May 02, 2019 3:40 pm

PS This does not mean that it will be supported by the Portsdown software!!

Famous last words

With the cost of the RPi 4 8Gb and the Jetson Nano being closer or the same now I thought it worth looking at this from a more technical perspective. My purpose here is a hardware and cost only comparison, I will leave the software portability of Portsdown, Langstone, etc to other with more knowledge and experience.

Here is a comparison chart of the RPi4 4Gb and the Nano... Note that the only upside on the Nano is the H.265 encoding and Maxwell GPU with 128 Cuda Cores. While these two elements could potentially make it the superior device for Portsdown it loses out on CPU and RAM. The Jetson TX1 is almost identical tot the RPi 4 4Gb with the exception of the NVIDIA Maxwell GPU with 256 CUDA Cores with a used price of around $30-$60 for just the module without the development kit board

The Jetson TX2, a used price of $50-$100 for the module alone without the development board, is the first real competitor from the Jetson family. It has all of the elements that make it a desirable device for our purposes of Portsdown, Langstone, etc and is becoming more affordable all the time...
dual-core NVIDIA Denver2 + quad-core ARM Cortex-A57
256-core Pascal GPU
8GB LPDDR4, 128-bit interface
32GB eMMC
4kp60 H.264/H.265 encoder & decoder
Dual ISPs (Image Signal Processors)
1.4 gigapixel/sec MIPI CSI camera ingest
HDMI 2.0
802.11a/b/g/n/ac 2×2 867Mbps WiFi
Bluetooth 4.1
USB3, USB2
10/100/1000 BASE-T Ethernet
12 lanes MIPI CSI 2.0, 2.5 Gb/sec per lane
PCIe gen 2.0, 1×4 + 1×1 or 2×1 + 1×2
SATA, SDcard
dual CAN bus
UART, SPI, I2C, I2S, GPIOs
It can be run as a stand alone module with a breakout connector, looks like an only Pentium3 block with heatsink and fan, or on a development kit board with all the connections easily accessible. The serious Jetson family competitor, from a purely technical perspective, could be the Xavier (specs below) but at $399 it is not going to be a popular choice until it enters the secondhand market at half price or less.

Quote "PS This does not mean that it will be supported by the Portsdown software!!"

Thank goodness for that, I just sent off for a PI 4, I though for a moment that I was heading off in the wrong direction again.

Take care, Stay safe
Terry

I just order an 8Gb RPi for so understand your position.

The RPi is still the front runner, technically, at the price point however there is no reason why - with an appropriate fork or adaption - that the Jetson family could not be an alternative for those who wish to use it. It should be a (fairly) simple case for a good developer/coder to make the changes for video and audio devices - I understand the principles but not the actual "how to" - and I2C and GPIO stuff should be simpler still.

The advantage of the design are developers and coders have come up with is that it is modular and adaptable to new ideas and technology as well as possible on most budgets.

Andy

You've missed a couple of points in your very useful analysis.

The Jetson Nano (I have a first generation one here) is excellent at hardware H264 and H265 encoding. It is a class above the H264 encoder on the RPi 4; this is its key strength. Its first weakness is that the drive capability and robustness of the GPIO pins is pathetic. They latch up if exposed to any electrical noise and can only sink/source a few milliamps. The second weakness is that it does not have a DSI port for connection of a touchscreen.

The RPi 4 is good at driving GPIOs and has a DSI port which supports an excellent (if expensive) matching touchscreen display.

Memory is not an issue for the likes of Portsdown - it uses well less than 1GB when running.

The Porstdown does support control of a network-connected Jetson Nano (see the slightly out-of-date guide here https://wiki.batc.org.uk/Jetson_Nano). This is the system that I use for my QO-100 transmissions.

Dave, G8GKQ

I agree that the h.264/265 encoding is superior on the nano, and especially as NVENC can use the Cuda Cores for hardware acceleration.

I was not aware of the susceptibility to noise. Would a better enclosure remedy this?

The lack of a DSi port will probably remain a problem until better touch screen technology is available.

I am going to experiment with the TX2 I have right now for OBS and encoding.