NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

FRC Teams:

As some of you may know, NVIDIA visited the FIRST Championships in St. Louis this year.

While NVIDIA has been involved in various ways in the past, this was my first experience with FIRST.

I was completely blown away. I was amazed by the technical excellence, the competition, the cooperation, the professionalism. Having been in the tech industry for almost 18 years, I can tell you that FIRST embodies the best aspects of science and technology.

One of the reasons NVIDIA was at Championships was to show off the new Jetson TK1 developer platform. It’s a small, low-power, fully functional computer. Great for computer vision for robotics. You can learn more about it here: http://developer.nvidia.com/jetson-tk1.

Other relevant information, including list of compatible cameras, is here: http://elinux.org/Jetson_TK1

We thought it would be fun for FRC teams to show off how they would use Jetson TK1 to solve this previous year’s challenges, and share their work with the rest of the community. NVIDIA is offering the Jetson TK1 for $130 (normally $192) to FRC teams. If you are interested please fill out the form here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JetsonTK1-First

Edit: The discount will be available until July 12, 2014.

Thanks

Jesse Clayton
Product Manager, Mobile Embedded | NVIDIA

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

Jesse:

It was quite a pleasant surprise to see NVIDIA at the FIRST champs alongside so many other sponsors! Sadly, I only passed by your booth, as the great list of things to do, such as presenting the Chairman's Award, kept me busy throughout the entirety of the event. Besides presenting the award on behalf of my team, I was very actively involved in programming this season. Not just robot programming, but off-board vision solutions as well. I just talked with my team's head mentor, and he would be happy to consider purchasing this board for our team, so as to further improve in the vision area. We have just one problem. The link you provided does not include a "Country" field, which leads me to believe that this product is only available within the United States. Is there any possibility of buying the board from Chile?

Thanks for the support your company is giving to FIRST!

Lucas

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

For years we've all wanted enough compute power to do some very serious computer vision on our 'bots, and now we have it. I've been working with the Tegra TK1 on a project at Google for the last eleven months and what we're able to do with this device at Google is jaw-dropping. Want to autonomously navigate the field using just a camera and a gyro, you now have enough compute power to do it on your 'bot at video rates. Over the Summer I hope teams will take advantage of this cool offer and start developing software to solve the typical problems you face every year on the field that (formally) required a human-in-the-loop to solve (e.g., game piece tracking, hazard avoidance, path planning and navigation, etc.) If you do this, and are prepared for the game reveal next January, imagine the amazingly cool things you'll be able to do.

If you've read this far and you're still not convinced that you should learn CUDA, VisionWorks and OpenCV programming over the summer instead of playing Call of Duty XVII for countless hours, do yourself a favor and spend just sixteen minutes of time watching this video starting at 1:20:00:

http://www.gputechconf.com/attendees/keynotes-replay

-Kevin

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

That was an oversight. The survey has been updated to include a country field. Thanks for the catch!

Jesse Clayton
Product Manager, Mobile Embedded | NVIDIA

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

Thank you. Survey form completed.

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

This looks awesome! Thank you for the opportunity.

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

Wow, a very cool devboard. My team has ran an onboard computer the past 3 years. I really like the SATA on board. Last year we did realtime HD recording from 2 cameras (and a 3rd in standard def) and we hit a major bottleneck in disk bandwidth.

My only request would be to have more USB ports, as we used 5 last year.

Does this have support for accelerated video encoding?

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

Aside from the additional board space needed, I suspect the reason there is just one of each type of USB port is most people would use a powered hub(s) with the board.

Yes, it has a built-in high performance H.264 hardware video encoder. I'm not sure how it is exposed to Linux user space, so I would go over to the support forum and ask. Here's a link:

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/b...edded-systems/

-Kevin

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

Sure, and it's what we did for 2013. However having fewer things that need to get separate wiring and power are always good.

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

For those that may be curious about the project I mentioned above, we unveiled the Google Project Tango tablet at Google I/O today in San Francisco. I'm sure there will be much more info released about it it the coming days, but this video will give you an idea of what you can do with the Tegra K1-based Jetson TK1 computer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KrkW1afnuI

At 0:31 of the video is a short demonstration of odometry that may be of interest to a few teams :-)

-Kevin

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

My dev board just showed up, thanks so much to Jesse. When I saw it had a 12V power supply instead of 5v like the other boards, my concern is that this would be an issue on the robot.

Under heavy motor load, even a fully charged battery can dip to 11v, which causes a problem for onboard systems that require a steady 12v. Looks like this won't be an issue: http://developer.download.nvidia.com...14May01_V2.pdf

The range seems to be 9.5v to 16v (13.2v if you're using a SATA drive that uses the 12v rail, though I think that's only spinning drives that regularly use that, which on the robot will already have more issues)

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

While it won't help the Jetson (because of the high power draw), the 2015 control system will include a Voltage Regulator Module (VRM) by Cross the Road Electronics that will provide regulated 5v @ .5amp, 5v @ 2amp, 12v @ .5amp, and 12v @ 2amp. We'll have to wait for the 2015 rules to see which rails are required for control system components and which are available for team use.

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

Based on the numbers in the Technical Brief and Technical FAQ the 12V 2A VRM supply may be near the edge, but it is possible it would work for running the Jetson board.

If the wireless solution is the 1522 as has been rumored, the 12V rails should be fair game with the radio on the 5V 2A supply.

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

I think you would still want to run the Jetson directly from the unregulated power.
They also mention the 12v only directly powering the fan and SATA power, so if you're not running a 12v SATA drive (not aware of any SSDs that use that), the only unregulated load on the Jetson is the fan.

Re: NVIDIA Jetson TK1
 

In addition to what others have posted, there is some information on using alternative power sources on the Jetson public wiki: http://elinux.org/Jetson/Jetson_TK1_Power .

Notably:

The Jetson TK1 accepts a standard 2.1mm DC barrel plug (center-pin is positive while the outer ring is negative) and is rated for 12V DC input, but will actually work with any input voltage between 9.5V to 13.5V. Note that SATA disks require a fairly precise 12V, so you shouldn't be using voltages at those ranges if you will power SATA hard drives from the Jetson TK1. It is known that the Jetson TK1 board won't turn on at less than 9.5V and it will likely be damaged at 16V or above. It may also be possible to power the Jetson TK1 board somewhere in the 13.5V to 16V range but NVIDIA has not tested this.