Auvidea J90 concerns

Is anyone else using an Auvidea J90 carrier board?

I have one, but I was initially a bit disappointed, for a couple of reasons:

  1. It was sold as having “100BT Ethernet for short ranges,” but the appropriate RJ-45 connector isn’t actually included, and cannot be bought on their website. If I had known this, I’d have happily paid for it on the original pre-order, but this was not advertised or available. (In fact, their product details page shows a picture of the adapter among all the other bits of the board.)

  2. It was initially specified as having 15-pin 1mm CSI connectors for cameras. I have custom cables made for that connector. However, the board, as shipped, is using 22-pin 0.5mm connectors. The documentation contradicts itself on which connector it is – in the front, it says 15 pin; further in, it says 22-pin.

I sent a message to them on June 22, with a follow-up on July 3, but I haven’t heard back, so I’m not so sure about their desire to actually support their customers, either.

So, I can’t yet use this as my main carrier board, although I’m working on making/getting the appropriate adapters.

Does anyone else have experience to share on this topic? Anything else I should expect or plan for that might be a surprise?

Hi Snarky,

we are software and hardware partners and we sell carrier boards for auvidea and we are software experts for Nvidia embedded devices as well.

Please send me you email to my PN and i will make sure that you get the right support or we initialise a return.

Gary

Hi Snarky,

the J90 is a very new product and we just started to promote it. We are in the process of preparing the peripheral components such as an optional RJ45 network connector, if somebody requires it. Please contact our sales team at sales@auvidea.com and they can get you one.

  1. sorry that there is a confusion about the number of pins on the CSI-2 connector. We will correct the technical documentation. We can provide you a little 22 to 15 pin adapter board (38237) to connect 15 pin devices like the B101 module.

We are receiving many support tickets in our ticket system. Our support team does their best to answer them in a timely manner. Bit the team is understaffed so their may be some delays.

If you have an urgent request please feel free to contact us by phone or email. We will do our best to support our customers.

Best regards,

Jurgen

Thanks. I did, a few weeks ago, but haven’t heard back yet. Instead, I bought some PicoBlade connectors/crimped wires and a RJ-45 socket from Digi-Key and soldered my own. I was just disappointed that such a simple and necessary needs wasn’t taken care of up-front, and frustrated at having to wait longer.

Thanks for the offer; I appreciate it! The problem was that I already had custom 15-pin cables that fit “just right” into my application, so an adapter wouldn’t really help. I got some flat 22-pin 30cm cables from Amazon to replace them; not as nice as the round ones, but connects the cameras.

At this point, I would be much more interested in a driver for the IMX219 sensors that actually works with the J90, because without that, I’m 100% blocked on further progress. So, the more time you can focus on that happening, the happier I will be :-)

The other drivers (IMU, UART2, watchdog, etc) would be useful, too. For example, the manual talks about a “mcu” tool, but I can’t find a download location for that. It also talks about a IMVU viewer tool, but I can’t find the IMVU driver itself anywhere.

Hi Snarky,

the J106 and the J90 are very similar. Please connect the IMX219 camera to the CSI connector J11 on the J90. This is CSI-EF. It connects to I2C device 2. So please check the I2C connection with i2cdetect -y -r 2. Please make sure that pin 6 (CAM_GPIO) is high, to power up the camera.

Please check the J106 manual, how the IMX219 camera should respond to i2cdetect.

On the J106 this pin is driven by pin H8 (GPIO2_CAM0_RST).
On the J90 rev 1 this pin is driven by pin H7 (GPIO3_CAM1_RST = GPIO3_PS.05 = GPIO149). Please make sure to set this pin high manually. This pin will change on the upcoming J90 rev 2.

echo 149 > /sys/class/gpio/export
echo out > /sys/class/gpio/gpio149/direction
echo 1 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio149/value

Next please install the firmware 2.1 or 2.2. It is designed for the J106 and supports 6 IMX219 cameras. It should support at least 1 IMX219 camera on the J90 (CSI-EF).
auvidea.com/firmware

Please let me know, how it goes.

Best regards,

Jurgen

Thank you, I will try this.
I actually do need two cameras, but I’ll start with one to see what happens.

Where can I find the “mcu” command line tool that the manual talks about?
And where can I find the drivers for the on-board IMU?

Also, the firmware I find on your website says that it only works for the TX1, and only works for L4T 24.2.1:

June 2017	J100/J106/J120/J130/J140 
firmware (kernel and patches)
(46 MB)	2.2	supports: Jetson TX1 only (L4T 24.2.1)
includes WIFI fix for the TX1

I use a TX2, and I need to use Jetpack 27.1 (and, ideally, 28.1 with the upcoming fixes for TX2.)

Finally: What’s a good email address to ask questions like these?

Sharky, just want to resurrect this old thread, since I’m curious if you were able to get IMX219 camera to work with J90 carrier board?

-albertr

Hi Jurgen,

I have a similar problem. I’ve got a J90 carrier board which works fine with my TX1 (UART, Ethernet). However, I cannot connect the camera due to 15 to 22 pin mismatch.

Can you confirm if this cable will work? I see it available on Amazon for about $8

Thanks, Adi

@albertr I got 22-pin cables, but I could not get the camera to the point where it was capturing.

Separately, I lost interest, because the driver they provide does not use the Jetson ISP for processing the images, so it will rely on the CPU, and thus adds significant load and also significant latency to get the images into the GPU again.

For now, I’m using the original development board. I’ve also found that using a display even when running is quite helpful, so if the J90 had a mini-HDMI, I might be bothered to try it again, but as it is, I’m going for “works” over “small.”

Yeah, lack of HDMI output is certainly a disadvantage. I was debating which carrier board to get and decided to go with J120 instead. Still would love to see if anyone can make a Paspberry Pi camera work with these boards…

-albertr

Did this cable work for you?