A big number of recent startups have into picture thanks to Small development boards. Many popular boards like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino have been an inspiration to several projects as well as many start ups.
The boards are very important in starting a project like a machine for brewing beer but their computation power is highly limited. For projects that need real compute power, and may be local machine learning, the NVIDIA Jetson boards come into picture. TX1 was the first board released in 2015.
NVIDIA has launched the Jetson TX2 board, a more power-efficient and powerful type. The Jetson TX2 board is in the family of the Drive PX boards used for autonomous driving and have the same Tegra “Parker” silicon like the Drive PX2. There are several similarities between both families as they can both be used to boost local machine learning to transportation. The Drive PX boards are primarily designed for automotive that have high ranges of temperature as well as high reliability requirements. The Jetson boards are designed for compact enclosures as well as power for smaller, portable equipment.
Jetson can be used for machine learning for devices like drones, robots, 360 cameras, medical among others. The capacity to process information with little power is needed in cases of limited bandwidth connectivity, latency is important as well as concerns over security and privacy.
Jetson TX 2 was launched at an event hosted by NVIDIA in San Francisco that brought together several companies as well as researchers that use Jetson in their projects and products. The climax of the event was the Cisco Spark Board which comes with a large monitor which is used as an interactive white board for video conferencing. The board has the ability to track the number of people in a room and able to change its display settings accordingly.
The Cisco Spark Board also comes with a 12-element microphone array to track and highlight a person talking at a time. Additionally the board can automatically wake up in case an authorized person enters the room and picks up work from where it was last.