Is the Jetson Nano Developer Kit a good fit for our project?

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson Nano
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1

I have a project that will require 2000 units to be built.

An engineering team has created an application using the developer kit that will count objects going through a small clear chute.

We found some information on this website : https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/faq

It states that the developer kits are not “production ready”

Our application runs in Linux, and uses 3 USB ports to work. I have not found a carrier board to replicate what the developer board can do. We would have to have one custom made.

These units will be installed in a climate controlled facility, and be running very low workloads.

My question is:

  • Are the developer kits suitable for this style production?

  • Seeing how our application is running in Linux, does it then make sense to stay with the developer kits anyways?

  • In terms of cost to performance, the developer kits are $54. Getting a custom carrier board with a production nano module would cost $300+. For more than 5 times the cost, does it even make sense to use the production model Nano?

  • Are the failure rates of the developer kits that high? That link we found seems to think they would be.

Thanks in advance,

Mark

2

In case this is an internal usage scenario and your management is fine with “lower cost but higher outage probability” you may go for the Dev-Kit.
If you want to sell this as a product to customers you probably want to have access to Nvidias support (which is only available for the production module) and I would strongly consider the limitations on availibilty and BOM for the DevKit.

3

FYI, there are separate modules sold (without carrier board, but with eMMC storage) for commercial use. There is no warranty transfer with the dev kits, but the warranty is transferable with modules purchased separately. It isn’t about failure rate so much as it is other guarantees, e.g., transfer of module warranty.

I couldn’t answer if this is practical. You are right that you’d need to develop a carrier board. It would depend a lot on whether or not you need the GPU.