Unless you’re doing something truly weird, any Raspberry Pi accessory should work just fine (once you port the software and drivers, of course - though they both run Linux, and are both ARM devices, so it shouldn’t be hard). Pinout.xyz has the Pi pinout in great detail, and it all lines up (from what’s labeled). The back of the Nano has the pinout with more detail, and everything still matches. What about the special purpose pins? Some of the pins have multiple uses - hardware serial pins, I2C communication, talking to an EEPROM on the board… The voltage and ground pins are all identical, and while the numbers are different, nVidia is labeling the pin ID, and the Raspberry Pi’s chart is labeled with the actual chip GPIO number at each point. This is the Nano’s pin layout (looking down from the top).įrom the Raspberry Pi site, this is the Pi’s 40 pin layout. If you find differences, please, comment and let me know. On further investigation, it’s pretty much identical. I said last week that the pinout was quite similar to the Raspberry Pi. The kernel driver in use is the r8168 driver. If you’re curious, the NIC is on the PCI Express bus (not USB - so it’s not sharing USB bandwidth), and reports out (lspci) as a Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15). I’ll call that proper gigabit! I’m sure I could do better if I tweaked things (or had something other than a dirt cheap switch out there), but the interface isn’t limited like on the Pi. I set up an iPerf3 server on my office iMac and saw nearly 940Mbit (TCP) between the two systems. The 3B+ can’t push more than about 280Mbit over the link, because it’s hung off the USB2 interface. The Nano has a gigabit interface - but so is the Raspberry Pi 3B+. Last week, I didn’t cover the network interface because I ran out of time. So, another couple review items, then diving into… well, really, it’s all in the kernel build. NVidia’s new little board seems like it should be a whole lot better, so I’ve been trying to figure out how to tweak it so it’s the best little desktop I can make it.īefore diving into the desktop steps, there are still a few points I want to cover that I didn’t get to last week. It makes the machine massively better, and I’ve been using my hacked up 3B+ since they came out for desktop use without any issues. The difference between a “chokes after a few tabs” Raspberry Pi 3 and a “usable with a dozen tabs open, quite a few terminal windows, IRC connections to the world, Hangouts up, and a few other things running” is a proper heatsink, the addition of a USB SSD, and rebuilding the kernel to enable compressed swap. Repurposing ARM architecture hobby boards for a desktop is a bit of a weird rabbit hole to go down, but the thing is, I’m getting pretty good at it - and they’re surprisingly capable. AMD’s making a good run, but a desktop class system is still somewhat expensive. There are a few ARM desktops out there (few, far between, and often somewhat expensive), and then there’s x86 - and, mostly, Intel-produced x86 chips. I don’t like computing monocultures one bit, and in 2019, we find ourselves in one for desktop/laptop use. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past year or two working on turning little ARM based boxes into desktops - and there’s a reason. If you haven’t read last week’s post, go do so. Does this count as desktop use? Up to you, but I sure consider it impressive for a little $100 board! It’s responsive enough that I’m happily typing this post on it. What we’ve got here: A Jetson Nano, running a 4k display at 60Hz, running an Ubuntu Server virtual machine (somewhat slowly - still working on virtualization), Netbeans running, Chrome Chroming with a few fairly heavy tabs open, IRC connected, and Plex Media Server running a video. The result? After some tweaking and playing around (and the normal-for-me kernel build), it’s a very solid little desktop that can handle an awful lot! I’m making it into a desktop, I’m measuring power use, and I’m poking at various other places I find interesting or useful. This week continues the Jetson Nano analysis. Last week, I unboxed the Jetson Nano, set it up, and did some basic benchmarking on it.
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