I sadly have two AGX Orin devkits that were being used in a trailer, which someone set alight, then the fire department put the fire out causing water damage also. The devkit boards are totally wrecked, but the modules themselves seem to work fine.
Does anyone know if it is possible to buy replacement devkit boards?
Our devkit carrier board does not sell seperately, you may check those ecosystem partner product to purchase the carrier board, see Robotics & Edge AI | NVIDIA Jetson
Regardless of which carrier board you will operate from, it is usually the case that you can flash or clone from any other carrier board. It isn’t until boot that this actually matters.
The device tree is used to tell the module about the layout of a carrier board’s optional pin routing possibilities. Many third party carrier boards use a different pin routing, but if the device tree is updated, then that module would tend to work on that new carrier board.
A few rarer carrier boards probably exist which use the same electrical layout for the carrier board as their carrier board. In that case no changes would be needed and most likely installing the module would “just work”.
The carrier boards which exactly match the layout of the dev kit will tell the end user (in their documentation) to use the NVIDIA flash software, and will not require any patch.
The carrier boards with a non-exact layout match will have some parts which function, and other parts which fail. For example, maybe USB would fail, and you couldn’t use a keyboard or mouse until device tree is updated, but Ethernet could work and ssh could be used to update the device tree.
The carrier boards with a non-exact layout match to the dev kit carrier board will give instructions to use either their patch on the NVIDIA flash software, or else will have rebranded flash software. The key is to look at the flash instructions on each third party carrier board and preferably find the one which says to use NVIDIA’s flash software. Secondarily, if a patch is provided, then if enough of the Jetson functions to get the patch over there, then you can probably update the device tree on the running system without losing the rest of the install.
If you don’t mind flashing again and starting with a clean install then any of those carrier boards probably work well (assuming the module isn’t actually damaged).
I have no experience with third party carrier boards. The earlier partners URL would give a number of URLs and you could go to each and see if they sell carrier boards, and then go to documentation on flash instructions; if you find one that says to use the NVIDIA flash software, those should be a drop-in replacement. The others would work after flash with their software. I don’t think there is any real risk of damage from being plugged in to a different carrier board, although bending pins is itself always a risk.