AAEON has sent me an NV8600-Nano AI developer kit equipped with an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano 8GB for review. I’ll start the review with an unboxing to check out the board itself and accessories, before booting it to the preinstalled Ubuntu 22.04 OS (JetPack 6.2). In the second part of the review, I’ll test the board and software in more detail, including some benchmarks and features testing with a focus on AI demos using the provided USB and Raspberry Pi cameras.
NV8600-Nano AI developer kit Unboxing
I received two packages: one for the NV8600-Nano AI developer kit itself, and a smaller one for a “Full HD Machine USB 2.0 camera”.
The exact part number can be found on a sticker: NV8600-KIT-JP620N-A1-1010. It also lists basic information like Orin Nano 8GB, four Ethernet ports, six USB 3.0 ports, two MIPI connectors, a 40-pin GPIO header, CAN Bus and COM ports, and M.2 Key-E/B/M sockets, one of which is fitted with a 256GB SSD.
The board is fully assembled with the Jetson Orin Nano module and a heatsink+fan cooling solution, and ships with a 12V/5A (60W) power adapter and one Raspberry Pi Camera Module 2.
The top side of the board features two MIPI connectors, a 40-pin Raspberry Pi-compatible GPIO header, a SATA port, a 20-pin NC-SI connector with I2C, Debug UART, Reset, Power button, and power signals, and a PoE connector (bottom right above).
The bottom side comes with an RTC battery, and three M.2 sockets: Key-E for wireless, Key-B + Nano SIM card slot for 4G LTE/5G, and a Key-M socket fitted with a 256GB M.2 2280 NVMe SSD (ESMP256GKB5G2-E13TI with Phison PS5013-E13TI-31 controller). There’s also an ASMedia ASM2806I 6-lane PCIe Gen3 x2 switch and three Intel I210AT gigabit Ethernet controllers.
The front side of the board features three USB 3.0 ports and four gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports.
The rear “panel” comes with a power button, a 2-pin 12V/24V power connector, a COM port, a CAN Bus connector, an HDMI video output, a recovery button, and a micro USB port to flash the firmware to the Jetson module.
I’ve removed the heatsink to have a closer look at the Jetson Orin Nano module. I also removed the fan as the heatsink would not come out easily, but it’s not necessary, and loosening two screws on the bottom side of the board is sufficient.
Removing the Jetson module reveals that the carrier board is called PBA-TON9.
There’s nothing special about the USB camera, except that it’s rather sturdy and also features a mounting bracket.
Camera installation and first boot to Ubuntu 22.04
Connecting the USB camera is super easy: select one of the USB 3.0 ports and remove the protective cover from the lens. The Raspberry Pi Camera Module 2 is connected to a 22-pin white flat cable by default. I’ll need to change that to the brown cable (22-pin/15-pin) and connect it to one of the MIPI CSI connectors. I went with CSI0. I also inserted the green power connector for power.
The kit does not ship with a power cord, so you’d have to get your own. I used one from a projector, but any cord from an old tower PC would do too. I added a USB RF dongle for a mouse/keyboard combo and a portable HDMI monitor to complete the setup. A green LED in the bottom left corner lights up when you connect the power, and the fan is active, but the board won’t start until you press the power button, after which another green LED close to the button will light up
I could boot to Ubuntu 22.04. I initially had some troubles logging in, as the (PDF) documentation mentions aaeon/aaeon as the default username and password (update: now fixed), but the user devkit is used instead, and it turns out the password is also devkit, like on the UP Xtreme i11 Edge mini PC.
Let’s quickly check some system information with inxi:
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devkit@devkit-aaeon:~$ inxi -Fc0 System: Host: devkit-aaeon Kernel: 5.15.148-tegra aarch64 bits: 64 Console: pty pts/0 Distro: Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) Machine: Type: Other-vm? System: NVIDIA product: AAEON BOXER-8654AI_RefKit` platform v: N/A serial: <superuser required> Mobo: NVIDIA model: Jetson serial: <superuser required> UEFI: EDK II v: 36.4.3-gcid-38968081 date: 01/08/2025 CPU: Info: 2x 4-core model: ARMv8 v8l variant: cortex-a78 bits: 64 type: MCP AMP cache: L2: 2x 1024 KiB (2 MiB) Speed (MHz): avg: 730 min/max: 115/1728 cores: 1: 730 2: 730 3: 730 4: 730 5: 730 6: 730 Graphics: Device-1: tegra234-display driver: nv_platform v: N/A Device-2: ga10b driver: gk20a v: N/A Device-3: ga10b driver: gk20a v: N/A Device-4: Sunplus Innovation FHD Camera type: USB driver: snd-usb-audio,uvcvideo Display: server: X.org v: 1.21.1.4 with: Xwayland v: 22.1.1 driver: X: loaded: N/A unloaded: modesetting failed: nvidia gpu: nv_platform,gk20a,gk20a note: X driver n/a tty: 80x24 Message: GL data unavailable in console. Try -G --display Audio: Device-1: tegra186-audio-graph-card driver: tegra_asoc: Device-2: Sunplus Innovation FHD Camera type: USB driver: snd-usb-audio,uvcvideo Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.15.148-tegra running: yes Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.99.1 running: yes Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.48 running: yes Network: Device-1: Intel I210 Gigabit Network driver: igb IF: ether1 state: down mac: 00:07:32:c1:21:1d Device-2: Intel I210 Gigabit Network driver: igb IF: ether1 state: down mac: 00:07:32:c1:21:1d Device-3: Intel I210 Gigabit Network driver: igb IF: ether1 state: down mac: 00:07:32:c1:21:1d Device-4: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet driver: r8168 IF: ether0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: 3c:6d:66:2d:36:58 IF-ID-1: can0 state: up speed: N/A duplex: N/A mac: N/A IF-ID-2: docker0 state: down mac: 5a:41:f0:4f:04:7e IF-ID-3: ether2 state: down mac: 00:07:32:c1:21:1e IF-ID-4: ether3 state: down mac: 00:07:32:c1:21:1f IF-ID-5: l4tbr0 state: down mac: 3e:c7:e7:79:f3:87 IF-ID-6: usb0 state: down mac: 7a:e4:f4:a6:83:19 IF-ID-7: usb1 state: down mac: 7a:e4:f4:a6:83:1b Drives: Local Storage: total: 238.47 GiB used: 20.1 GiB (8.4%) ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Phison model: ESMP256GKB5G2-E13TI size: 238.47 GiB Partition: ID-1: / size: 233.12 GiB used: 20.1 GiB (8.6%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1 ID-2: /boot/efi size: 63 MiB used: 110 KiB (0.2%) fs: vfat dev: /dev/nvme0n1p10 Swap: ID-1: swap-1 type: zram size: 635 MiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/zram0 ID-2: swap-2 type: zram size: 635 MiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/zram1 ID-3: swap-3 type: zram size: 635 MiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/zram2 ID-4: swap-4 type: zram size: 635 MiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/zram3 ID-5: swap-5 type: zram size: 635 MiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/zram4 ID-6: swap-6 type: zram size: 635 MiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/zram5 Sensors: Message: No sensor data found. Is lm-sensors configured? Info: Processes: 283 Uptime: 10m Memory: 7.44 GiB used: 1.07 GiB (14.4%) Init: systemd runlevel: 5 Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.13 |
So we have “AAEON BOXER-8654AI_RefKit” running Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS with Linux 5.15. The BOXER-8654AI-KIT is another developer kit from AAEON with the same carrier board, but a Jetson Orin NX instead, and I assume it shows up here because it’s based on the same device tree file, or they forgot to change the name. The 6-core Arm Cortex-A78(AE) processor is detected and clocked up to 1728 MHz and coupled with about 8GB (7.44GiB) of RAM. Everything else looks detected properly too, including the ” Sunplus Innovation FHD Camera type: USB” (the USB 2.0 camera), the four gigabit Ethernet ports (3x I210AT + 1x RTL8111), and the 256GB Phison SSD.
The sensors section complains about not having any sensor data found. But lm-sensors is already installed. It’s just that there are no temperature sensors, only voltage and current sensors:
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devkit@devkit-aaeon:~$ sensors ina3221-i2c-1-40 Adapter: c240000.i2c VDD_IN: 4.99 V VDD_CPU_GPU_CV: 4.98 V VDD_SOC: 4.99 V in4: 5.20 V in5: 520.00 mV in6: 1.52 V sum of shunt voltages: 8.20 V curr1: 1.04 A (max = +5.04 A, crit max = +5.04 A) curr2: 104.00 mA (max = +32.76 A, crit max = +32.76 A) curr3: 304.00 mA (max = +32.76 A, crit max = +32.76 A) curr4: 1.55 A (crit max = +131.06 A) |
People who want to check the full boot log can do so on pastebin.
One thing missing from the list is the Raspberry Pi Camera Module 2. The program nvgstcapture-1.0 is supposed to output video from the camera input, but it complains that no camera is detected, and the kernel log has no “imx” entries (The Camera 2 is based on an imx219 sensor). I’ve double-checked the camera connection and tried the second MIPI CSI connector, but it’s still not working. I eventually managed to make it work with Jetson-IO utility, where I changed the 24-pin CSI connector configuration to Camera IMX219-C (Camera IMX219-A did not work with an I2C failure).
After a reboot, I could see some imx219 kernel messages without errors:
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devkit@devkit-aaeon:~$ dmesg | grep imx [ 10.941385] imx219 9-0010: tegracam sensor driver:imx219_v2.0.6 [ 10.958355] tegra-camrtc-capture-vi tegra-capture-vi: subdev imx219 9-0010 bound |
This time around, running nvgstcapture-1.0 without any parameters worked fine. It was surprisingly hard to find a solution to this issue…
Some basic board-specific instructions can be found on GitHub, but it’s basically an enhanced Jetson Orin Nano Super devkit with extra features. I’ll have some studying and reading to do for further testing.
I’d like to thank AAEON for sending the NV8600-Nano AI developer kit along with a USB 2.0 camera review. The devkit can be purchased on the UP shop for $649 plus eventual taxes and shipping, and the UP HD camera sells for $35.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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