Hi everyone!
I wanted to share a little initial insight into some extreme environmental testing data from my recent project, “Project SHIVER”. I am working on qualifying COTS hardware for surface applications, and I recently took my custom avionics payload (powered by a Jetson Orin Nano) to the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) for an semi aerospace-grade qualification campaign.
We put the some Orin Nano’s through a mechanical and thermal test plan and here are some results we found very interesting:
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Vibration Survival: The Jetson & associated hardware easily survived a 10g full-level sine vibration and a 9.7 g-rms random acoustic simulation on an electrodynamic shaker. Pre- and post-test 0.5g resonance sweeps confirmed no structural degradation occurred.
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The Cold Limit (-48°C): During our Ambient Thermal Chamber (ATC) runs, the Orin Nano pushed well past standard datasheet limits. It operated normally down to an ambient temp of -48°C before finally powering down.
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Full Recovery: Crucially, upon returning to ambient temperature, the system fully recovered and booted up perfectly with what appears to be no permanent hardware damage or solder cracking.
Here are a few photos of the Jetson and associated hardware surviving the shaker table and the thermal chamber (fuelled by the essential late-night engineering snack: Jaffa Cakes!).
I thought the DevRel and engineering teams here might be interested to see some edge-compute hardware surviving simulated extremes. :D
Has anyone else on the forums pushed their Orin Nano past the ambient -40°C temperature mark? I would love to compare notes on what components typically trip first in extreme cold!
Cheers,
George