Is it possible to get video out of one of the USB connectors on the Developer Kit?
No. The driver never implemented this.
What if I was making a custom carrier board tho? Would it be possible in that instance, to have a single USB-C connector going to the Thor T5000 SoM to connect to an external docking station for video and possibly ethernet?
That still would not work if you want to use the Jetson’s GPU for display. You’d need another driver. It can get more complicated because the Jetsons GPU driver (it is an integrated GPU, or iGPU) does not always play nicely with discrete GPU drivers (a dGPU). If your external station has its own graphics system, and you find some way to pass through to it for graphics display, then that could work (it would be complicated though). What is the exact situation that you need to work with? E.g., it is different to display graphics than to use the GPU for CUDA, but from what you’re asking so far, I don’t think this is feasible without some extreme effort at a custom docking station (I’m not saying impossible, but a docking station designed from scratch is similar to a custom carrier board that gets complicated).
I was planning on trying to reduce the number of connectors on my custom carrier board. Instead of having dedicated HDMI+RJ45 connectors, I was hoping I could get by with a single USB-C port for video+ethernet and plugging into it a “docking station” like the one pictured here.
Video is one of the things you won’t get to work with that. You’d need to feed the Jetson’s actual GPU signal to an adapter which goes between USB and the iGPU of the Jetson (or give up on the Jetson’s GPU and use an external GPU).
My last question would be if I could get Ethernet working thru one of the USB ports using one of those USB to Ethernet adapters? Again, trying to minimize number of connectors on custom carrier board and not have to have a big bulky RJ45 connector.
USB Ethernet works well, but you have to be certain the driver is present. If not, and if Linux normally has that driver without the manufacturer having to provide it (this is the case for most USB Ethernet), then you might need to add the driver. Adding a driver has nothing to do with whether or not a Jetson supports that hardware, it is a question of (A) whether or not Linux has the driver, and (B) whether that driver is present. If not present, but available, then you might have to compile a module for the driver and copy it to the right location.
Thank you for all your help!