Yesterday, March 18th, the NVIDIA Jetson Nano was announced at GTC. As you left the keynote (or when you got back to the San Jose Convention Center) you could purchase one for $99. I purchased a Nano and thought I’d give you a quick look at it.
Here is a link to the press release announcing the Jetson Nano.
Below are is a gallery of shots I took of the Jetson Nano and all the stuff that comes in the box which isn’t much.
The unit does not come with a power supply, though it uses a Micro USB connector like most other small compute devices such as Raspberry Pi’s. It also does not have a wireless network built in, and it needs a micro SD card for the OS.
To get started you can visit https://NVIDIA.com/JetsonNano-Start (note this is case sensitive, and if you want to see a cute 404 error get the capitalization wrong).
The Jetson Nano page walks you through setting it up in 6 steps. Which all look very straight forward. The most complicated of which is flashing the SD card.
Some of the things that jumped out at me as I look at the Jetson Nano are that it has both a full sized DisplayPort and an HDMI video output. I’m curious about that value of one over the other.
Another area of interest is that the heat sink has holes drilled for a cooling fan and the base board has a connector that support the addition of a fan. Speaking of the base board, the Jetson Nano is attached to a base board allowing for the NVIDIA chip to be removed (with a screwdriver). The base chip seems to use the DDR4 laptop format for the slot between the base board and the chip, or at least that’s what the connector shows. The micro SD card slot is on the chip its self and not on the base board of the Jetson Nano.
It has a 40 pin expansion header (GPIO, I2C, UART) for different sensors as well as a MIPI-CSI camera connector. There is also a jumper that disables the the USB power input and the allows only the use of the 5V DC power input.
I’d power it up here in my hotel room but I left all my display cables back in Kansas and I dont have a keyboard with me.
Thought I’d share with folks. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet with the Jetson Nano but what ever it is it will be fun.
May your servers keep running and your data center always be chilled.
