Control Jetson Orin NX using a mobile app

[shanakaramesh2012]

Hi,
I’m planning a project to monitor patients’ behaviours using cameras. I plan to use Nvidia-Jetson orin NX as the development board for my project. But before purchasing that, I want to double confirm few things.

1. As a requirement, I want to monitor patients and send some commands to Jetson using a mobile app. It can be connected via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. I just wanted to know if that is possible with Jetson orin NX. Is there any guidance for the implementation?

[AastaLLL]

Hi,

Please check if our Jetson Platform Services can meet your requirements:

https://docs.nvidia.com/jetson/jps/moj-overview.html

Thanks.

[linuxdev]

I won’t give a specific answer, but keep in mind that Jetsons are full computers running Linux. Linux itself is really what you’re asking about. Although making an application which works with a Jetson from a smart phone may not in and of itself be as simple as you think (depending on circumstances it might be as simple), any application which can log in over networking (and an IP address with ssh over the Wi-Fi counts) has a possibility of working.

I tend to “feel” that Bluetooth may not be as great as you think it might be, but if you can get Bluetooth working on the Jetson (which could be frustrating), then that too would work (but Bluetooth is not as flexible as wired networking or Wi-Fi).

Keep in mind as well that if you are trying to use Wi-Fi directly from smart phone to Jetson, without an intermediate local area network, you’re going to have a lot more issues with making the networking succeed (similar to the frustrations and learning curve you might find for Bluetooth). Bottom line: If you have the Jetson on a network, and the phone goes to that network, but not directly to the Jetson, then those are your best odds, and perhaps reasonable as well.

If you are intending to watch video content which is previously recorded, then that is just a file transfer. If you want to watch something as it runs, then that’s a different story. You might have to set up a virtual desktop and/or RTSP streaming. Do check those above requirements, and make sure you’re willing to spend the time for whatever type of connectivity. Think about if you are just controlling something versus watching live, those differ quite a bit in the effort required.

[shanakaramesh2012]

@linuxdev Thank you very much for the descriptive response. So if I use a wired connection between mobile and Jetson, can I use the mobile app to control Jetson (give some commands to Jetson and get output video or result log)? Would that be possible?

[shanakaramesh2012]

Thank you for the response. I prefered to control/monitor the outcomes of the jetson without using a cloud platform.

Let’s say I want object detections. So, the camera is connected to the Jetson. Then I have a mobile app which is able to launch the programme, make some settings like frame rate, and get/display the output.

I want to do this without a cloud. Both wired or remote connections to the mobile are acceptable.

[linuxdev]

Here is a suggestion: Try to do what you want with a smart phone and a regular desktop Linux PC. Set it up to allow ssh login (this can be simplified with keys, but you don’t want to lose keys; or you want a login password to the key). ssh with a smart phone can be a pain, it is designed for text, and your smart phone might have a virtual keyboard. If you don’t know how to use command line directly on Linux, then you’ll have even worse of a time over networking.

I don’t know of a mobile app per se that has anything to do with your case. Are you going to write this app yourself? If you are going to author a smart phone app it implies you have significant experience doing so. Anyone who can author any smart phone app can probably add ssh to a Linux end point to run text commands. If you have set up text commands on any Linux computer, and if ssh is used with keys, then the part about getting the text command to the Jetson is trivial. Everything else might not be so trivial. An example is if you have a medical monitoring app, then perhaps you want some security so someone else can’t pick it up and use, but perhaps you don’t want to enter a password every time, and instead want to use biometrics…that’s something your smart phone can do, but it would be quite a learning curve.

It isn’t possible to give you a good answer. Each piece has to be considered individually. A Jetson which blindly sends a live RTSP video stream is easy enough, lots of people on the forums get help on creating an RTSP stream, but none have asked about making it secure.