Hey, I’m very new to this so sorry for whatever in advance.
In my university class we used SSH with a wifi router to connect to our TX2 dev board. I’ve now bought a TX2 but I’d like to connect with a cable to my laptop - I don’t have any need for remote connection and I’d rather not have to buy a whole router. I’m wondering if it’s possible to just hook up the TX2 to my laptop directly (Ubuntu 18.04) and just have the console to set everything up (i.e. no GUI from the TX2).
Something that has come up in my research is using a serial connection, but I’m not sure whether I can do absolutely everything with that. I’d like to basically have SSH but with a wired connection (and have my TX2 share my laptop’s WIFI connection). Is this possible?
Thank you.
Do you have an ethernet port? You could use a crossover cable without a router. This is really good performance.
You’ll also find that on more recent releases (to some extent later L4T R28.x releases, but mainly L4T R32.x releases) there is a virtual router provided via the micro-B USB cable. What this means is that when a type-B cable is connected to the micro-OTG port sample code runs which makes the Jetson appear to the laptop/desktop to be a network device and to provide DHCP setup (basically plugging this in to the host tells the host this is a USB network card, and then a virtual router assigns the address…the hardware is entirely emulated/sythetic/fake, but the host PC/laptop does not know this nor does it care).
If you monitor “dmesg --follow” on your host PC, then watch what happens when you plug in the micro-B USB cable (full sized type-A at the laptop side). You’ll see a MAC address mentioned.
If security or other steps do not interfere, then “ifconfig” should report a new interface on the laptop with address “192.168.55.100”. This is the virtual adapter. The Jetson side has address “192.168.55.1”, and thus you should be able to “ping 192.168.55.1”. If ping works, then so should “ssh 192.168.55.1”. This is USB2 and will be less than half the performance of a gigabit adapter, but will still be very responsive for remote use.
Note that virtual ethernet is wired ethernet. The network device is simply in software instead of hardware.
WiFi can also work, but I tend to avoid it. I can’t be much help setting that up.
Thank you for the reply! This sounds like exactly what I need.
I’ll try setting it up with the micro-B USB cable.