Hey everyone. My last laptop just got killed. I have a big trip coming up where I will be biking a lot (a few months). So I was researching around on and off about mini itx vs laptop for using as a bike compy. I was considering the idea of a moped batt and a solar panel (eventually working my way up to an ebike).
The primary use of the selected machine would be to do my online schooling (so I need a word processor and be able to work online). I was also hoping to start a youtube channel so I could doc the trip…which means being able to make simple youtube vids as well.
Of course the primary problem was power because it would be difficult to do these things and carry the weight of the baggage as well.
Enter TK1. I had been eyeing the embedded stuff for awhile but not really happy since I couldn’t really get much info for this project. The fact that the tk1 has been shown to run on li-po batts makes I perfect for another project I had in mind…a compact bike computer to do some crazy stuff with (electronic shifters, gps tracking to show my route, etc). The fact that the tk1 has both the l4t and that I can control all the stuff directly or via pics/arduino while being able to run on 12v packs is making this a tasty treat.
Of course the too good to be true is, I’m sure quite that. I was considering using blender for editing, but I haven’t yet found any concrete evidence that blender is supported (ie they say problems with internal graphics cards and I’m not sure I it would work on armv7 to begin with).
Damn windows phone hit post instead of enter sorry…
So roughly my needs are:
Video editing (blender or any compatible arm/l4t software)
12v power (li-po batts)
Word processing (libre office)
Online connectivity
If you can forsee any problems, or can tell me what/why it will not work I would appreciate it. Of course, I could fix my laptop (ok its a chromebook lol) or get a new laptop but things to consider are that I am currently a traveller/nomad so I can’t go back to a workstation to edit vids and basically i want to make my bike also my workstation. And finally its not about necessarily feasibility as fun. These are the beginning steps of a much larger project I hope to have in the future…should it lead to something viable (ie if I need to forego video editing to get everything else as most people dont need such capabilities on a bicycle).
I was curious if blender worked as well. Unfortunately, there were some errors and blender crashed. I’m not sure what would be required to get it working.
Well so far on blenders site it says that there isn’t full support for integrated graphics. I read somewhere else also that blender has a problem with armv7 architecture as it is designed for x86.
By the way, I’m a first year engeering student with 10 years experience as an electronics tech (and hobbyist arduino/pic and electronic stuff among other things). Unfortunately software has never been my strong point so if I seem lacking in that department my apologies.
The issue I ran into with blender failing was something about invalid X11 authentication during install. If you uncomment the repositories which are optional in /etc/apt/sources.list, blender and its related goodies show up…so apparently someone has posted something for ARMv7 on blender, it just doesn’t work yet. I don’t know if this has anything to do with integrated graphics per se, as the X11 issue was during related package install and actual runtime failure looked like an audio issue.
During blender install:
apt-get install blender yafaray-exporter glew-utils javascript-common spacenavd
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
blender-data libboost-locale1.54.0 libboost-thread1.54.0 libglew1.10
libilmbase6 libjs-jquery libopenexr6 libspnav0 yafaray
Suggested packages:
libtiff4 apache2 lighttpd httpd
The following NEW packages will be installed:
blender blender-data glew-utils javascript-common libboost-locale1.54.0
libboost-thread1.54.0 libglew1.10 libilmbase6 libjs-jquery libopenexr6
libspnav0 spacenavd yafaray yafaray-exporter
0 upgraded, 14 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 24.2 MB of archives.
After this operation, 89.8 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
...
Starting spacenavd daemon
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.19-0ubuntu6.6) ...
X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-16) ...
root@tegra-ubuntu:~# which blender
/usr/bin/blender
...
ubuntu@tegra-ubuntu:~$ blender
Color management: using fallback mode for management
AL lib: UpdateDeviceParams: Failed to set 44100hz, got 48000hz instead
Writing: /tmp/blender.crash.txt
Segmentation fault
There are probably other editing apps which might work, as blender to me has been more for animation. It would be interesting to hear what apps people have used for video editing from Jetson.
Jetson itself is probably quite good at what you want to do, but setting it up to do those things would not be fast. So far as technical hurdles go, display is on the list due to wanting to be mobile/12-volts plus needing HDMI type display connection. There’s no doubt that the project would be interesting for a mobile bike comp.
You might want to check out Google’s Project Tango Devkit. It is a 7" android tablet with a TK-1 and 4 gigs and lots of cool sensors. It recently got reduced to $512 from $1024. Apparently it can do CUDA v6. I don’t know if it will run blender.
Linuxdev you are totally right. I was a bit confused about the target of blender and I had the feeling it was geared towards animation. It also seems to be the most mainstream of the bunch as far as video editing would go so I figured if I could get a yes for blender, I might have a chance at a better suited program. I’ll keep investigating. Since this is the first time I’m doing real video editing and not something at school or something half-baked, I don’t know much about the industry (competitors, options, etc)
As for the display…it’s probably one of the-realistically-largest hurdles of this project. Since I don’t even know if I will be able to find a suitable screen to display. So thank you for pointing that all out. I figured if I got a yes or no on whether this was possible to begin with I would continue on with the power requirements. So as of now I am considering it a partial yes haha. I will let you know if I can find something suitable as far as video editing.
…which brings me to the chromebook. Part of the reason for doing this was to build a complete, standalone computer bike. But in the end if I’m reinventing the wheel by trying to basically attach a laptop to a bike, I can save a whole bunch of money with duct tape. Although the feasibility itself is not an issue, it’s the redundancy that gets me. Since I already have a chromebook, I could easily replace the needed parts. Ironically, that chromebook link you posted is both good and bad news for me. I’m sure it has full capabilities, and an advertised 13 hour batt life is very difficult to contend with. So I’ll have to seriously think about what I’m going to do going forth…
Tonyvr thanks for the info. I’m looking it up and wondering if it could not be a simple solution to what I’m looking for. Actually if it could run any decent video editor then it might be the perfect item for this job as it solves the display problem.
Thanks guys for all the help! I came out with some great info and I’ll keep you all posted as to the route I go .
If you want to view the display on your bike, you might want to check out this cool display from Adafruit that can viewed in daylight. It comes with an hdmi adapter,so it should work with the Jetson. I haven’t tested it, though.
Good luck and have fun! Check out my 3D printed Jetson case at