Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

A new brain for US$249?

Used to be that if you wanted to have fun with a small SBC you went out and splashed some cash on a Raspberry Pi.

However, these days the Pi is so 2023 and it's now almost 2025.

So who's the new kid on the block and why is it so different and so much more powerful?

What is it about this product that will get some geeks salivating and laying out their cash as soon as stock is available?

Could it be the 67 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of computing power?

Could it be the 32 Tensor cores and the 6-core ARM processor?

Or could it simply be that this is an AI system from NVIDIA that claims to be 142 times faster than the original NVIDIA Jetson?

Well it's probably all of the above and it's the new NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super, a powerful little SBC that does all this while consuming as little as 7 watts of power.

Perhaps the target market for this system is a lot smaller than the one for Arduino or Raspberry Pi SBCs but this would sure be a fun bit of kit to experiment and play with.

The US$249 price-point brings it well within reach of almost anyone who wants to dip their fingers into the world of AI without using their desktop machine and its GPU to do so.

Vision processing, generative AI, large language models, robotics -- the potential list of applications is long and exciting.

For example, how long before someone uses one of these to create a security camera that not only identifies when someone isn't a family member or other legitimate resident and then issues a warning for them to leave the premises. If they fail to comply it could control a small paintball gun and loose-off a few rounds, so as to encourage compliance with such an order.

If you're a bird-fancier, perhaps you could program one of these systems to recognise different bird species and automatically create a database of the number and type of winged creatures that visit your garden or other location.

Let's face it, once you've got one of these AI boards hooked up to a camera and the right software, it becomes capable of things that we could only dream of, a few short years ago.

I had a quick look to see if these boards are available locally but no luck yet.

A Google search turned up this AliExpress listing but as is so often the case, this is highly deceptive. The product on offer here doesn't seem to include the Jetson at all, it's the carrier board and accessories although they don't exactly go out of their way to make that obvious do they?

When these do become available locally I may splash out some cash and buy one to have a play around with. When combined with some drone technology it would be very interesting to see exactly what could be achieved.

Carpe Diem folks!

Please visit the sponsor!

Here is a PERMANENT link to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font