With the Jetson’s basically out of stock for the rest of our lives, I’m starting off our Weekly Thread Wednesdays asking all teams to chip in with the new ideas and boards people want to look into buying/using for this years RMNA competitions.
Please try and format your replies with some of the basic following information:
Board name, technical specs link, and your personal comparison/opinions as it stacks up to the Jetson and even other boards you are interested in!
Specs/overview: BeagleBoard.org - ai-64
Discussion on the chip itself: "TDA4VM" chip family for embedded vision processing - #2 by kaelinl
Developing code for the TDA4VM will require more specialty knowledge and more trial-and-error than a Jetson would. There will be fewer pre-built libraries, especially e.g. stereo cameras. You’d need to develop software targeting the TI hardware in particular. However, these boards are available (if not super plentiful).
Since these boards are $180 already, they aren’t a clear steal on price relative to going rates for the low-end Jetsons. So I’m not sure it actually makes sense to use one of these in place of even an existing Jetson series right now. However, I think it’s worth keeping on our radar. The main thing that interests me is the integration of microcontroller cores in the same chip as the higher-power ARM cores and the vision processors. I could absolutely see one of these used as a combined vision processor and controls platform.