Nvidia's $99 Jetson Nano Developer Kit brings GPU-supercharged AI smarts to maker projects

Machine learning is coming to the masses, and those hordes of DIY drones and robots are about to get a whole lot smarter. On Monday at Nvidia’s GTC conference, the company plans to reveal the $99 Jetson Nano Developer Kit. The kit is an expansion of the company’s “Jetson” embedded graphics platform, and it aims to infuse your wildest maker projects with AI that the Raspberry Pi could only dream of. It’ll be available immediately online, through distributors, and at GTC itself.The Jetson Nano Developer Kit is a standalone version of the new Jetson Nano AI computer also announced today. As you’d expect from an Nvidia product, the GPU’s the secret sauce—a 128-core beast that looms large on the maker board. Based on the “Maxwell” GPU architecture that powered the company’s GeForce GTX 900-series graphics cards, it’s capable of 472 GFLOPS of FP16 performance, HEVC video encoding at either 4K30 or 3x 1080p30 resolution, and HEVC decoding at 4K60 or 8x 1080p30—meaning it can monitor several high-definition video inputs at once and process the images it sees in real time. This is a powerful GPU to hand to makers. It’s tamed by a massive black heatsink sitting atop the module.To read this article in full, please click here