- Introduction to NVIDIA Jetson Nano
- Exploration of technical specifications of NVIDIA Jetson Nano
- Exploration of NVIDIA Jetson Nano’s functionalities
1. Introduction to NVIDIA Jetson Nano
Agus Kurniawan1 (1)Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia
NVIDIA Jetson Nano is an NVIDIA product that can implement IoT solutions with the power of GPU computation. This board has GPIO pins and a GPU core to help developers, makers, and IT users build programs easily. In this chapter, we will get a brief introduction to NVIDIA Jetson Nano.We will cover the following topics:
- Introduction to NVIDIA Jetson Nano
- Exploration of technical specifications of NVIDIA Jetson Nano
- Exploration of NVIDIA Jetson Nano’s functionalities
Introduction
The Nvidia Jetson Nano was announced as a development system in mid-March of 2019. This product is intended for Internet of Things (IoT) makers. The board consists of a CPU with 1.43 GHz and a GPU with 128 cores of the Maxwell generation.The first model of NVIDIA Jetson that was released for the consumer public can be seen in Figure 1-1. It’s called NVIDIA Jetson Nano A02. Now, NVIDIA has releasee a new model, the NVIDIA Jetson Nano B01. Technically, both models have the same CPU and GPU, but some peripherals are changed. You can see the NVIDIA Jetson Nano B01 in Figure 1-2. In this chapter, we will review the specifications of the NVIDIA Jetson Nano.
NVIDIA Jetson Nano Hardware Specifications
In general, NVIDIA Jetson Nano has the technical specifications shown in Table 1-1. You can see it has a GPU with 128 cores. This feature is useful if you want to perform high computation on this machine.Table 1-1
NVIDIA Jetson Nano Features
| Feature | Information |
|---|---|
| GPU | 128-core Maxwell |
| CPU | Quad-core ARM A57 @ 1.43 GHz |
| Memory | 4 GB 64-bit LPDDR4 25.6 GB/s |
| Storage | microSD |
| Video Encode | 4K @ 30 | 4x 1080p @ 30 | 9x 720p @ 30 (H.264/H.265) |
| Video Decode | 4K @ 60 | 2x 4K @ 30 | 8x 1080p @ 30 | 18x 720p @ 30 (H.264/H.265) |
| Camera | 2x MIPI CSI-2 DPHY lanes |
| Connectivity | Gigabit Ethernet, M.2 Key E |
| Display | HDMI and display port |
| USB | 4x USB 3.0, USB 2.0 Micro-B |
| I/O | GPIO, I2C, I2S, SPI, UART |
| Mechanical | 69 mm x 45 mm, 260-pin edge connector |
To obtain an NVIDIA Jetson Nano board, you can visit the official website at https://developer.nvidia.com/buy-jetson?product=jetson_nano. You can see NVIDIA distributors that sell NVIDIA Jetson Nano.
What Can We Do with NVIDIA Jetson Nano?
NVIDIA Jetson Nano is designed for general purposes to address computer problems. Let’s see what we can do.
Daily Computer Activities
We can say the NVIDIA Jetson Nano is a computer of small size. Since NVIDIA Jetson Nano is a computer, we can treat it as an everyday computer. We can browse the internet to look for information.
We also can use it for daily computer activities such as writing documents, creating spreadsheets, and printing documents. We can install office applications from LibreOffice. By default, LibreOffice is already included in the NVIDIA Jetson Nano image. You can see my LibreOffice application in Figure 1-3.The user must just provide a keyboard, mouse, and monitor so as to make their own personal computer. It’s useful to apply for teaching on classroom or computer lab activities.
Internet of Things Development
The primary goal for NVIDIA Jetson Nano is to build IoT solutions. We can add sensor and actuator modules to NVIDIA Jetson Nano devices. The board provides a GPIO interface so as to be attached to external device modules.
Other I/O interfaces such as serial communication, SPI, and I2C can be accessed from our program. This board can leverage your IoT business and projects.
Programming platforms like C/C++ and Python are supported in the NVIDIA Jetson Nano image. Since this image uses operating system–based Ubuntu, we can install various compilers and applications, including web applications and databases.
We will explore these features, IoT, and software applications in Chapters 4 and 5.
AI Development
NVIDIA Jetson Nano has a GPU with 128 cores. This resource can be used for AI applications. We can run Pandas, Numpy, Tensorflow, and Keras on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano board.
We only focus on how to build AI programs. NVIDIA Jetson Nano will take over your computations. To obtain optimized computation, make sure your library and program support GPU cores from NVIDIA Jetson Nano.
If you have interest in computer vision, you can apply NVIDIA Jetson Nano to do that. You can attach external cameras via the CSI interface or USB camera. By installing the OpenCV library, we can utilize NVIDIA Jetson Nano to create great computer vision programs. OpenCV library provides various image and video processing libraries. We can use it on your programs such as C/C++ and Python directly. In addition, OpenCV consists of machine learning libraries like face recognition.
