Arduinos are fun, and Raspberry Pis are cool, and hams have been quick to adopt these platforms and use them in amateur radio applications. The latest small computer—the NVIDA Jetson Nano—could take this to a whole new level.
The Nano is the newest and the smallest of the NVIDIA Jetson Series of machine learning (ML) enabled computer boards (shown below). It come is a DIMM package measuring only 70 x 45 mm. Despite the small size, the specs are very impressive:
- 64-bit, quad-core ARM Cortex-A57 CPU complex
- 128-CUDA-core Maxwell GPGPU designed to handle video streams as well as ML chores
- 472 GFLOPS of performance.
Performance-wise, NVIDIA has shown that it can process eight 1080p video streams while using deep neural networks to identify objects in each stream. The system can also drive two displays using HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort (DP) 1.2 or eDP 1.4, as well as DSI.
To get started using the Nano, you can purchase the $99 Jetson Nano Developer Kit. The developer kit includes a Jetson Nano DIMM (without the eMMC storage) and costs only $99. You must use a MicroSD card with the kit for storage.
To program the Jetson Nano you use the NVIDIA JetPack, which includes a board support package (BSP), Linux OS, NVIDIA CUDA®, cuDNN, and TensorRTTM software libraries for deep learning, computer vision, GPU computing, multimedia processing, and much more. The software is available using an easy-to-flash SD card image that makes it easy to get started.
NVIDIA Jetson Nano modules will be available from distributors worldwide starting June 2019. The NVIDIA website says that the development kits will be available by the end of March.
But, what can you do with a Jetson Nano? There’s an incredible amount of processing power on this board, so the question should be what can’t you do? I could see feeding it the I/Q stream from an SDR and decoding CW, phone, and digital signals. Taking that a step further, perhaps it could monitor the bands and alert you when say 6m is open.
I’d love it if perhaps some of you with more experience in this area could enlighten me a little on the possibilities. What do you think the Jetson Nano could be used for?
Edward Vielmetti says
AG1LE has been working on this! See http://ag1le.blogspot.com/2019/02/performance-characteristics-of-ml-morse.html
Dan KB6NU says
Aha! I forgot about AG1LE. I’ve written about his work in the past.
Dave New, N8SBE says
Crypto-currency mining, of course. ;-)
Rory N6OIL says
Your funny Dave, because that was the first thing that crossed my mind!
Neal Probert, KD8NVN says
Just moved to Beverly Hills from Farmington Hills and just fired up my Jetson TX1 to slurp up the software updates. I just started wondering just what could I do with it in terms of HAM Radio. Perhaps something where I can speed up data processing and spectrum analysis? Perhaps SatNOGS?
Dan KB6NU says
I think these are all interesting applications. Another possibility is to have it monitor the bands and alert you when the bands seems open. I think the possibilities are endless.