What hardware do you suggest for battery and solar to power the jetson nano?
Hi vondalej, the particular setup and capacity would be a bit specific to your application (i.e. how much power is your program using on the Nano, how often and how long does it need to run for, what level of sunlight are you receiving, ect).
Regardless of the particular battery though, you would want to use a 5V voltage regulator capable of delivering 2A or more. I recommend looking at the tegrastats output while your program runs to determine how much power the Nano is using. tegrastats will output the overall power used by the board next to POM_5V_IN (remember to run tegrastats with sudo privilege).
You can also reduce power consumption by switching to 5W mode using nvpmodel tool, or you can edit /etc/nvpmodel.conf to tweak your own mode for the power that you have available.
1 Like
Honestly, Overkill is better. The plan was for it to run a bird watching program with a camera as well as run programs on a pond in my back yard. Sun will be mostly afternoon.
It will hang on a tree in the back yard.
It seems that you could run this with a USB battery charger that can typically output 5V 2A. If you have a solar panel that connects directly to the input USB port of the battery, then you wouldn’t need any additional hardware.
However, even if you run it in low power mode, that would be at least 5W power usage if it runs continuously. Even a large 20000 mAh battery pack will not last for a full day with that. How much current does the solar charger deliver?
I’m running my Jetson with a 12V battery pack attached to a 12V/5V 5A converter. However, it doesn’t need to run continuously, so the battery is fine in that case.
I haven’t bought any hardware. I was looking for suggestions. I’ve been running a face detect script as a benchmark and it uses about 60% CPU. I’m guessing the other program will be similar.
You should run sudo tegrastats in the background while you are running your application and look at POM_5V_IN, it will tell you how many milliwatts the board is using, which will inform you of the battery capacity that you will need.
RAM 1497/3965MB (lfb 437x4MB) SWAP 0/6144MB (cached 0MB) IRAM 0/252kB(lfb 252kB) CPU [65%@1428,65%@1428,70%@1428,64%@1428] EMC_FREQ 11%@1600 GR3D_FREQ 0%@76 APE 25 PLL@54C CPU@59C PMIC@100C GPU@55C AO@62.5C thermal@57C POM_5V_IN 5334/5334 POM_5V_GPU 79/79 POM_5V_CPU 2623/2623