Antmicro’s open source Jetson Orin Baseboard available for purchase from CircuitHub

To streamline Antmicro’s wide-ranging embedded product development work for customers in aerospace, medical, automotive and other areas, we have been building a portfolio of reference designs and making it available on our open hardware portal. Together with our suite of software frameworks, those allow us to rapidly create prototype and PoC setups to validate the assumptions en route to a complete product. Often however, our customers would ask whether they could just source a board to do some exploration before they are ready to kickstart a project. In response to that demand, we decided to partner with CircuitHub who are now making our most popular design, the open source Jetson Orin Baseboard easily available for purchase on a dedicated page.

CircuitHub is an online Electronic Manufacturing Service (EMS) provider who specializes in rapid prototyping as well as volume production. Antmicro has been collaborating with CircuitHub already to complement in-house prototyping capabilities for pilot batches of demanding designs for our customer projects, including e.g. our DDR testing platforms. The partnership currently focuses on the JOB only but is expected to expand to other designs given enough interest.

A versatile gateway to an ecosystem

Despite its small footprint, the Jetson Orin Baseboard exposes an array of I/O connectors, such as video accessories, multiple options for power delivery, as well as expansions such as the one for storage we described earlier this year. The board’s major 1.1 update was described in more detail in a dedicated article. The baseboards on offer are manufactured by CircuitHub as described in the GitHub release of the 1.1.6 revision (note the baseboard does not include an NVIDIA SoM and a power supply).

Below we will present a brief overview of the baseboard’s features and how Antmicro’s commercial engineering services can help customers bring products based on the Jetson Orin Baseboard to life in terms of hardware modifications, Board Support Packages, software, deployment at scale as well as fleet and ML model management.

The Jetson Orin Baseboard at a glance

Jetson Orin Baseboard’s general technical specification:

• 120 x 60 mm footprint
• power delivery via USB-C, PoE and a DC (locking) connector
• 2x 50pin CSI camera connector (support for up to 4 cameras)
• 3x USB-C connector
• micro HDMI connector
• 2x M.2 slot
• expansion connector exposing:
  • PCIe x2 gen 4 or 2x PCIe x1 gen 4
  • USB 3.2
  • USB 2.0
  • GPIO signals
  • I2S
  • UART
  • 2x SPI
  • 2x I2C
  • CAN
  • 12V/5V/3.3V rails

For more information about the baseboard’s technical specification, you can refer to the the board’s page on Antmicro’s Open Hardware Portal.

Already purchased your first Jetson Orin Baseboard from CircuitHub? Follow the quick start guide in the Jetson Orin Baseboard documentation.

Open source frameworks and comprehensive engineering services for commercial edge AI devices

As part of its day-to-day, Antmicro creates and customizes hardware designs and provides comprehensive engineering services to bring complete systems to market with quick turnaround. The Jetson Orin Baseboard can serve as an ideal base for building edge AI systems, especially ones that need to pack many features in a small footprint, just like in the case of Aethero’s NxN Edge Computing Module (currently delivering an unprecedented 100 TOPS of AI-enabled compute in low Earth orbit).

On the hardware side, Antmicro can adapt a custom design to specific working conditions, like radiation, extreme temperatures or vibrations or adjust it to the physical constraints dictated by your use case in terms of size, weight, connector choice and placement, as well as enclosure design. The baseboard’s GitHub release also includes a mechanical model (as a STEP file), which makes reasoning about its physical shape and properties easier, for example when considering integration in a larger device.

For software, we typically use scalable open source build systems like Yocto/OpenEmbedded create complete reproducible, Linux BSPs, and additionally maintain the meta-antmicro Yocto layer that integrates our open source software portfolio so that it can be easily added to the project.

Among a number of smaller video and ML related tools, the range of tools that can be used include framework like Protoplaster, which helps in automated testing of hardware manufactured to a given spec.

Kenning, Antmicro’s open source ML framework can be used for creating deployment flows and runtimes for Deep Neural Network applications, letting teams design, test, benchmark, optimize (on physical hardware and in simulation) and deploy DNN models and runtimes.

Antmicro can also help you plan for the entire cycle of a device’s deployment with Remote Device Fleet Manager (RDFM), compatible with new NVIDIA BSP releases. It is an efficient and secure multi-OS OTA update and fleet management suite targeting heterogeneous deployments with varying scale and access to connectivity, which provides advanced features like delta updates, rollbacks or update groups that are easily deployable in your own infrastructure and CI environments.

All of those frameworks can be adapted and extended to your use case as needed, offering you full control of the entire stack, with commercial engineering services to integrate everything together with your product development flow.

Take your proof-of-concept from idea to product and deploy at scale with Antmicro

Antmicro’s open source Jetson Orin Baseboard design manufactured by CircuitHub can serve as a convenient starting point for development of proof-of-concept NVIDIA Jetson Orin-based edge AI devices thanks to its small footprint, extendability and a large array of connectors it exposes.

Leverage Antmicro’s comprehensive, vertically integrated engineering services that will take your device from the PoC stage to a complete, customized and future-proof edge product ready for full-scale deployment, with full tech transparency backed by our open source solutions and workflows. Reach out to us at contact@antmicro.com.