I wanted to share my experience after carefully following the instructions and different steps from the “Set up JetPack” video of the “Getting Started with AI on Jetson Nano” course offered by Nvidia. I recently flashed the SD card using Etcher and connected all the cables as recommended in the tutorial.
However, when I plug in the cable with 5V and 3A, my Nano Jetson board doesn’t seem to be working properly.
I have double-checked the connections, and I am certain they are correct. I have also tried restarting the board and the screen multiple times, but it hasn’t resolved the issue.
I am wondering if there’s something I might have missed or if others have encountered a similar problem. If anyone has any ideas to troubleshoot or suggestions to resolve this issue, I would be extremely grateful.
Jetsons don’t have a BIOS, and on a developer kit Nano, there is QSPI memory on the module itself. That memory has the equivalent of the BIOS in software, plus the boot software. The SD card does not contain this content. To boot correctly, the non-operating-system content must be a compatible release version. It is common to try to use an SD card with a release which is too old, and that requires flashing the Nano itself (not the SD card). The release should be compatible with the release which produced the SD card (more on that later).
Also, is the monitor true HDMI? If there is an adapter involved, then some of them basically don’t have the wiring needed for “plug-n-play” of the monitor’s specs. There is a fallback mode for failing that plug-n-play knowledge (it’s the DDC wire, which runs i2c, and the data is EDID).
If there really is something wrong, then the serial console is always the first “go to” to figure it out. Serial console runs on another computer, and the Jetson is able to produce boot logs and login even during boot stages (long before Linux starts). For serial console, see this: https://www.jetsonhacks.com/2019/04/19/jetson-nano-serial-console/
About flashing the QSPI: You need to use an Ubuntu 18.04 (or 16.04) host PC. VMs are a problem due to not handling USB correctly, but sometimes they can be made to work. Command line flash is more manual, but can work from a wider variety of Linux flavors. For flash to work, the Jetson has to be in recovery mode, which turns the Jetson into a custom USB device understood by something JetPack/SDK Manager downloads for you, the “driver package” (JetPack is the GUI front end to the driver package, and it is actually the driver package which performs the flash). That software runs on desktop PC Linux architecture. L4T is the software which gets flashed (L4T is Ubuntu plus NVIDIA drivers), JetPack is what performs the flash (via the driver package). SDK Manager is the network part which assists in automatic downloading. The L4T release and the JetPack/SDKM releases are tied together, so if you pick one, you’ve picked the others. The Nano is compatible with the L4T R32.x releases. You can find this and documentation here:
I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for your invaluable assistance and the information you provided regarding the Nano Jetson board. Your advice has been extremely helpful to me.
However, upon checking the contents of the box in which the Nano Jetson board was delivered, I noticed that the J48 component was missing. I was wondering if the presence of J48 is essential for connecting the board or if it is optional.
Once again, thank you so much for your support. I am looking forward to continuing my projects with the Nano Jetson board.
I think the default is to use the micro-OTG connector with a micro-B cable (basically a “charger” cable) to power this via USB. However, that isn’t able to provide enough power in some configurations, so you would need a standard 0.1" (2.54 mm) spacing jumper. I don’t know if kits are supposed to come with one of these or not. You would need this if you are to power via the barrel connector. Any method which shorts those pins with no “loose” wiring would work. Did this come with the micro-USB cable?
Do be careful if you use the barrel connector since it is a 5V requirement on the Nano (many of the other Jetsons use about 19.3V).