NVIDIA Jetson TK1

[jesseclayton]

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

[lucas.alvarez96]

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

[Kevin Watson]

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

[Kevin Watson]

Originally Posted by Kevin Watson

...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...

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

[sparkytwd]

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)

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by sparkytwd

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.

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.

[RufflesRidge]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

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.

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.

[sparkytwd]

Originally Posted by RufflesRidge

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.

I think you would still want to run the Jetson directly from the unregulated power.

The present kit includes a more than ample 12V @ 5A (60W) power supply. NVIDIA is evaluating smaller power supplies
for the production kit, since the reasonable stressful applications NVIDIA has tested so far are below 30W (12V @ 2.5A).

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.

[jesseclayton]

Originally Posted by sparkytwd

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)

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.

[sparkytwd]

Originally Posted by jesseclayton

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.

I believe most SATA SSDs require only 5v, such as the Samsung Pro 840.

If you want to be extra sure, you can cut the yellow wire on a standard molex adapter. 12V is generally made available for running the spindle motor, which even assuming a stable 12v, is a bad idea on a robot.

[NotInControl]

I am having one of my buddies ship me their TK1 dev board so I can test the Jetson TK1 with the Alpha/Beta hardware I have.

We used a beagleBone running openCV this year for vision in auto (it worked very well). With a 320x240 image we were getting 20fps with about 100ms lag behind real-time (not very noticeable, and very well within the requirements of hot goal detection).

Hopefully, I can get around to this, but I am going to recompile openCV with CUDA support, and see how much more we can do with the extra compute power.

I also wanted to take the same binary I had on the beagleBone, and run it directly on the RoboRio for comparative purposes, but haven't gotten around to that as of yet. But that is coming as well.

I am going to see how well this 12V board integrates with the RoboRio and new PDP. I may also end up putting it on a buck-boost supply so that when the robot dips to voltage, this guy doesn't loose its power. But I will only do that if other tests prove it is necessary. (my hunch right now is some boost supply will be necessary knowing how low our robots dip in Voltage).

The drivetrain I am running for these test is a 8 wheel (Traction Colson), 4-cim, single speed, so it should be possible to get the battery to dip to 8V instantaneously during normal driving.

I will report back what ever I can, as soon as I can. I just wanted to make the community aware that someone with Beta hardware is testing this out.

I am not sure I will buy one of these yet, it also looks like NVIDIA plans to release an upgrade to the TK1 early 2015 (maybe the new board can support 2015 build season?!).

-Kevin

[Gdeaver]

If this board is used for auto only voltage dip should not be a problem for most teams. However, seeing our voltage logs and some other teams this year the voltage drops would most likely be a problem for many teams. There are many automotive ATX style power supplies available. Not cheap and come with a standard ATX plug. 6 - 24 volt range is very common and they are designed to take a hard engine cranking in an automotive environment.

[NotInControl]

Thanks for the info. I personally probably wouldn't go the automotive ATX route. Those are typically used for CAR PC/infotainment systems with heavy power usages, which is why they are so expensive. I would be surprised if you could find one under 100 watts which is overkill for this application.

I was thinking more along the lines of a custom power circuit with one of these at the heart, if power conditioning was required (I think is will be).

$10 - http://www.digikey.com/product-detai...PBF-ND/3074261


$11 - http://www.digikey.com/product-detai...FCT-ND/3885241

I haven't down selected between the two, or even done an exhaustive search, but these two chips should provide more then enough power to support the Jetson TK1 at full performance on an FRC bot.

When I get around to it, and have a time to compare the features of these and other chips I will pick one, but at the moment I am leaning more towards the LED driver chip.

This is a more pocket friendly and application specific alternative then an ATX power supply

- Kevin

[Gdeaver]

Those are raw chips. Can you as a DIY project buy the BOM and make the boards? If you have boards made is the cost and time less than a COTS automotive power supply? There seams to be a void with small modules at about .5 amp and cheap and > 10 amp and expensive in the buck boost auto motive grade modules. I found a 12 volt 10amp module for 57$ singe output but nothing less till the low power stuff at 8$. If you are going to make your own, TI has some reference designs with everything figured out and ready to make. I think most teams would just want to buy the power supply and not get in to custom made power supplies.

[marshall]

Would sir care for a more robust design fit for a FIRST team?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...d_i=B00MHX6V88

http://www.amazon.com/Acer-Chromeboo...+chromebook+13

Supposedly there will be an OEM/Educational variant as well that will have 4GB of RAM but only 16GB of storage which will fall midway between the above two on the price scale and make me very happy.