Jetson Nano: NVIDIA's developer board and powerful Raspberry Pi competitor gets a new version

The world of developer boards is large, with the market broadly being distinguished between cheaper Arduino boards and more powerful devices like the ASUS Tinker Board series. Each end of the market focuses on different use cases and applications though, so price and performance do not necessarily correlate in this instance.

NVIDIA, a manufacturer best known for graphics cards, decided to get in on the act last year with the Jetson Nano Developer Kit. Unsurprisingly, the board incorporates a specialised GPU to differentiate it from its peers.

Now, the company has brought a new version of the developer board to market. The Jetson Nano still packs a Maxwell GPU with 128 cores, but version 4.3 of its Jetpack software now supports TensorRT 6.01 and cuDNN 7.6.3. Software refinements are not the only change though, as the B01 variant also includes an additional MIPI port for connecting cameras.

As before, the Jetson Nano Developer Kit incorporates four ARM Cortex-A57 cores that can clock up to 1.43 GHz, along with 4 GB of RAM. The 100 x 80 x 29 mm board also has a microSD card slot onboard and four USB 3.0 ports. Meanwhile, you can connect the board to external monitors via HDMI 2.0 or eDP 1.4 ports. Additionally, the Jetson Nano supports Gigabit Ethernet with PoE and has an M.2 slot for connecting a Wi-Fi card. Last but not least is a 40-pin GPIO header for connecting external actuators and sensors.

The Jetson Nano Developer Kit B01 costs US$99, just as its A02 predecessor did. Please note that the B01 is incompatible with the A02's base plate.