Hi,
This post is to guide how to identify whether your carrier board is a NVIDIA developer kit or a custom carrier board.
The reason to explain this is because there are too many users using a custom board and claming they are NV devkits. Most of them turn out not true and they are not able to be used directly.
Background story
A Jetson platform is formed by two parts. The module and the carrier board.
NVIDIA provides two methods to access the Jetson platform.
- The module alone.
- The module + a reference carrier board → NV developer kit
Generally, a vendor would buy a module alone and make their own carrier board.
Now back to Jetson nano case. There are two kinds of Jetson Nano 4GB modules officially released by NVIDIA.
- p3448-0000. This module has a sdcard slot.
- p3448-0002. This module has a internal 16GB eMMC storage.
Generally, p3448-0000 module only comes along with NV developer kit and p3448-0002 will be sold alone for vendor to use.
How to identify?
To identify whether a board is custom board or NV devkit, please take a look in the back of your carrier board. A NV devkit shall have a NVIDIA logo and with model name as “p3450” as below picture.
Q&A:
- Why does it matter using a NV devkit or not?
All the tools and Image released by NVIDIA (e.g. Sdkmanager/Sdcard image) are all based on NV devkit. We don’t guarantee it would work fine on a custom board.
- What is the exact definition of “custom board”?
Any carrier board that is not NV devkit is a custom board.
- But my board has a sdcard slot and eMMC at same time, what is this thing?
That board is a custom board. The sdcard slot is definitely “on the carrier board” but not on the module itself. That means the sdcard slot is added by the vendor. NV devkit does not have a sdcard slot on the carrier board.
- How should I use a custom board for Jetson?
Generally, you should check with the board vendor or the website of the vendor. They shall provide you customized software for their custom board.