I recently bought my first single board computer, the Jetson Nano Developer Kit. This single board computer is intended for artificial intelligence development. It is sort of like a Raspberry Pi for AI. The main reason I bought this device is because it has a Nvidia GPU with 128 CUDA cores. Many machine learning toolkits can use CUDA cores to speed up the processing. You need a high end Nvidia graphic card for that and they can be quite expensive. So at only $99.00 the Jetson Nano is a bargain.
Jetson Nano Developer Kit
I’ve been thinking of buying a Raspberry Pi and getting into the maker community but the Jetson Nano seemed a little sexier with its AI capabilities. Unfortunately it does not come with everything you will need. I had to buy a MicroSD card for the operating system. Then I had to buy a 5V 4A (4000mA) switching power supply from AdaFruit. I bought a Edimax EW-7811Un USB Wi-Fi wireless dongle to give my Jetson Nano wireless connectivity. But the biggest additional expense was a monitor with a HDMI connection. None of my flat panel monitors had that so I spent another $100 on a Spectre monitor. You also need a mouse and keyboard with USB connections but I did have those.
So far I have done absolutely nothing with my Jetson Nano because I’ve been busy. But I have been studying machine learning so I will put this device to its intended use. I will do something serious with it. At the very least it will allow me to run some demos that require CUDA cores. I might try to use it for natural language processing, computer vision, or computer graphics. Later on I may buy a Raspberry Pi since I have the equipment for using other single board computers.
