Suggestions for potential carrier board designers

If anyone is thinking of coming up with a new offering for a carrier board for Jetson TX2, here’s my list of suggestions:

  1. Concentrate on main purpose of Jetson - video processing. It needs to have connectivity to multiple cameras using different interfaces (x2 CSI-2 and x2 USB3 ?). It would be great if Raspberry Pi cameras will be supported, they are plenty and cheap. Don’t integrate any MEMs sensors, there’re plenty of dedicated navigation/flight controllers already.

  2. Make as many of UART, i2c, SIP, GPIO ports exposed as possible. Make CAN exposed for TX2. These ports will be used to interface TX2 to other boards dedicated to different tasks.

  3. Make it to have both USB3 ports and M.2 type M 2280 connector like Auvidea J120.

  4. Make a motherboard for it (the same concept as Auvidea has with M100 and J100). This motherboard should have HDMI out and Gig Ethernet to be used during development on a bench as well as for demos/shows.

  5. If possible do it in China to reduce the costs. Not many students can afford to spend $1K+ for Jetson, carrier board, cameras, etc.

-albertr

RidgeRun and Auvidea have collaborated to bring IMX219 (rPI2 sensor) support to TX1/TX2, see this post:

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/975962/ridgerun-support-for-six-raspberry-pi-v2-imx219-and-v1-ov5647-cameras-using-isp-multi-camera/

They also have a 6-camera capture rig with IMX219:

External Media

Many of the most popular ecosystem carriers from ConnectTech, Auvidea, and others include each of these ports. CAN bus was even supported before TX2 by way of SPI<->CAN adapters on the carrier. Now that TX2 supports CAN natively, these adapters can be disabled via DIP switch on the carriers.

The Jetson Developer Kit Reference Carrier Board design only supports one USB3 port, which is why you see many aftermarket carrier with the single USB3 also, however some of the carriers implement additional USB3 ports or hubs.

In addition to the Auvidea M100, ConnectTech Astro also has an interposer connector board available for development.

This concept is only really relevant to carriers which implement only the pico-blade style headers for direct wiring (ala Auvidea J100 and ConnectTech Elroy and Astro). Other carriers like Auvidea J120 and ConnectTech Orbitty include consumer connectors like HDMI, ect. on the carrier itself.

The carriers that utilize direct wiring and the pico-blade headers are typically used in the field in a deployed environment (i.e. onboard a production drone), as they are more rugged than the consumer connectors and less susceptible to shock and vibration.

Regardless of where the various ecosystem partners do their board fabrication and SMT assembly/test, I do know that they have made various products available over time to reduce the cost to the developer/user. It is significantly less expensive now than it used to be, which is good for everyone!

I also know that Auvidea and ConnectTech are always open to receive feedback on new product version, you should contact them with suggestions!