I have a suggestion for future versions of the Jetson development kit. You could include an additional, unconnected power plug that customers could use to make their own battery power cables. This would be inexpensive for NVIDIA to provide but a thoughtful added convenience.
The power adapter barrel plug I selected from my spare parts bin that fit my TX1 developer board unfortunately had a generous sized positive terminal surface. (I wasn’t going to cut up the supplied power adapter so soon!) The Jetson has a generous sized negative terminal on the power jack. My robot required 12V power to a USB hub and the Jetson, so I installed two plugs on the wire to the battery. The USB was plugged into the Jetson and when I plugged in the power to the board, I saw sparking. Apparently that was when I fried the power circuitry for the Jetson USB jack, for it doesn’t work now. The micro-USB jack operates but not the full-sized jack.
I don’t catch much about it…could you pls show the picture of your plug to TX1 and plugs on the wire to the battery? Also will appreciate for the picture of power plug you think can help users to make their own battery power cables. Thanks.
Here are the plugs shown on Github. The Jetson adapter plug is on the left and the spare plug I chose to attach to the battery on the right. The positive terminal on my plug is too extensive, extending to the nose of the barrel. It fit the jack well, so I used it, not thinking that it would short out if the USB cable was already plugged in and the nose of this plug contacted the box or face of the Jetson power jack. One spark, and my USB 3.0 circuit on the Jetson was fried! The other USB plug is 2.0, so it won’t work for the ZED camera. Grrr.
Here is the battery with two cords. One cord for the USB hub and one for the Jetson. A power switch in the cord would have been a good idea!
Got it. Yes, your spare plug surely has this kind of risk for its longer positive pole. But the correct steps should be: plug in power firstly and then plug in USB. That will not cause short as no shared GND in there before plug in.
AFAIK, few user needs an additional plug as it is common size and easy to get, even your plug can work normally if follow right steps.
BTW, can you share the pic of your damaged USB3.0 port? Maybe it can be fixed easily. :)
Trumany, there is no visible damage on the board. Just that the USB port no longer works. A device plugged in there detects nothing.
I have on order a PCIe-x4 card with a USB 3.0 port on it. We’ll see if this can work for the meantime. The box I made to house the Jetson isn’t tall enough, I fear, but I can build another box.
I took next week off from my regular job to develop software for my robot, so I wanted my hardware to be ready!