I just inherited a Jetson Nano 4Gb board which was donated to our makerspace and I’m trying to get it up and running. I burned the most recent image to a 32Gb microSD and inserted it into the board and connected an external barrel jack 4A - 5V power supply with the J48 jumper in place. The green light comes on noting that the unit is powered up, and connected via HDMI, the monitor briefly shows a full-screen Nvidia logo, but then goes black and nothing additional happens. No scrolling logs, no fan on the CPU turning on, nothing else. I connected a micro USB to the board and a laptop and there’s no registered connection to the device to try a serial connection either.
I tried powering it via USB as well, using a 3A 5V power supply which is rated for a RPi4, without the jumper in place, and again, the light turns on, the Nvidia graphic shows briefly and then nothing else.
It may in fact be that the board is non-functional, it’s always hard to say with donations, but I wanted to see if anyone had advice on other things to check before we dumped this into e-waste. Thanks!
The power supply recommended by NVidia is 5V 2.5A, I would say your power supply should work,
Just in case, avoid using HDMI to DVI adaptors since those are not supported.
Can connect a serial USB cable, and please provide the log.
When the Sd image was created did you use Nvidia [instructions] jus to be sure the image was written correctly (Get Started With Jetson Nano Developer Kit | NVIDIA Developer)
perhaps you can try with another SD. Is strange that the serial connection doesn’t show the bootloader logs.
Thanks again for the response. I followed the instructions for the Nvidia Jetson 4Gb, which is the device we recieved. I burned the image to the SD card and followed the instructions for the regular approach first and then tried the headless approach to see if that gave any different results. I also tried a different SD card just in case that was the issue.
When connecting to the micro USB the laptop doesn’t even recognize that the Jetson has been connected when powered up via the barrel plug, so there’s no way to point a serial app at the com port to monitor for boot up logs.
I read in the Nvidia instructions that the SD cards have to meet a certain criteria to work, which is why I tried a different one. I used a Samsung EVO Select, which is the same as I use in some of our recording cameras and seems to be a good quality.
Let us know if you have any other thoughts, thanks!
Thanks for responding. The information noted above in the thread is still accurate and there’s no change in what we’re seeing. Do you have any suggestions?
So, what I’m seeing with this method, as I’m doing it, is that it requires the Jetson board to be recognized by the host computer via the usb connection. Unfortunately, as noted previously, when connecting to the board via USB with an external power supply powering the board, the host computer doesn’t recognize that the Jetson is connected. This has been verified on three different computers, a Win 11 machine, a Raspberry Pi 400, and an iMac and noted above.
Furthermore lsusb from ubuntu shows no NVIDIA Corp devices either when connected.
I don’t know how to put the board in force recovery mode. Is there a resource you can point me at and I can try that.
For flashing, I’ve got a dual boot PC into Ubuntu, but was just mentioning that I tried to get the USB to be recognized on a variety of platforms as a cross check to ensure it wasn’t specific to a single machine and it’s not recognized on a number of different devices. I also tried different cables that I know to work with other USB devices to ensure it wasn’t just a cable issue.
Thanks, I appreciate that. I was following the instructions on the Jetson Nano page on the Nvidia developer site which didn’t have anything regarding this that I saw. The instructions there were pretty simple, flash the microSD using a program like Etcher, and then plug it in and start configuring, with some minor troubleshooting.
There wasn’t anything about shorting pins there that I saw, so it’s good to know what the essential steps are.
A follow up question, how do I know if I have an A02 or a B01 kit in hand? I’m not seeing that designation anywhere on the board. All I can tell is that this is a Jetson Nano 4Gb based on the card which was recieved with the donation.
It looks like that link was expired, but I was able to find this. Is this the same doc you were trying to share?
I wasn’t seeing something in here which helped clarify how to see if it was an A02 or a B01 board, but it might not be the same as what you were sharing possibly as well. Thanks in advance.
Ah perfect, thank you! It’s an A02 board based on the left hand side, just one camera connector and the power jack jumper is right below that camera connector.
Ok, working on the steps in the blog article you shared. Will post back more as that completes
