Instead of cameras with MIPI CSI-2, I would like to do with 3 to 5 radar sensors that uses ethernet gb interface to transfer data of 1 to 2gb/s. My end purpose would be to synchronously obtain the data from these sensors.
Questions:
Is there any Nvidia hw module that allows multiple ethernet connections that can stream the ethernet data synchronously ?
Which Nvidia developer board is suitable for connecting with hw module mentioned in 1) ?
Based on my research so far I understood I can use the Rivermax SDK SW protocol with not sure which network cards? . for 2) then only Jetson AGX Xavier can support this
If you have any comments on 1) and 2) please let me know.
Ethernet is not designed to be a realtime medium. For 5 sensors you will need an ethernet switch with maybe 8 1 or 2.5 GBit ports for the sensors and a single 10Gbit port for the uplink to the Jetson board. The switch will store incoming packaets and forward them to the uplink (not necessarily in the order they arrive! - this is normal and all network stacks are expected to handle this). So the timing relations between the sensors will always be somewhat off - not by much but by some 10 or 100 µs or so.
Imaging applications with 2 or more cameras use separate trigger signals for synchronization. These are extra wires with digital time pulses that determine when each camera captures the next frame. This is reliable down to µs or even lower. You might need something similar for your application. With this external synchronization the data link (Ethernet, USB, PCIe,…) does not need to be timed exactly, it just needs to be fast enough to transfer all data befor the next trigger event.
For Ethernet hardware: Intel cards have very good Linux support.
