Jetson Nano Compatible Devices

GPS/GNSS Development Boards
1

I have recently been sifting through numerous sparkfun products in search of a GPS unit that can operate with my Jetson Nano. I came across the GPS-RTK2 Board (#15136 or https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15136) which mentions that it supports single board computers over USB, though I did not find the same note for other products such as the GPS Dead Reckoning NEO-M8U and GPS Breakout - NEO-M9N, SMA (Qwiic).

Furthermore, in the Hookup documentation for these two alternative products, it states that other parts may be needed in order to properly utilize the gadgets, such as Qwiic cables and sparkfun RedBoards. How can I tell if certain products are compatible with my Jetson Nano? I am primarily looking for options that have support for USB-C but it is unclear to me whether I can hook up some products that mention USB-C connectivity to my Jetson Nano. Are either of my two provided alternatives compatible?

2

Are you going for high precision or not? The NEOs are very good but single band (L1) only. You’ll get ~1m horizontal accuracy. If you are looking for millimeter location, the dual band (L1/L2) ZED receiver is the way to go.

To answer your question, nearly any GNSS receiver can be made to work with the Jetson: it’s just serial. Every (and I mean every) receiver outputs NMEA sentences (https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/gp … g-gps-data). The Jetson can receive these using any USB to Serial (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15096) converter. The ZED, the NEO, even our cheap and cheery $20 module (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/19166) will give you location that would work with the Jetson (albeit, ~2m accuracy).

But I don’t think that’s what you’re really looking for. You want to plug one of our GNSS receivers into a USB cable, and have it appear on the Jetson. The ZED and NEOs will do this. My only hesitation is the Linux driver. I believe it will work, I just haven’t do it before. Here’s our docs for installing the USB COM driver for windows (https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/ge … ll-drivers). Consider checking out the PyGPSClient: https://github.com/semuconsulting/PyGPSClient - considering the python support, I suspect the USB driver for the u-blox module is generic enough that most platforms should detect it.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if there’s anything that’s still confusing.

3

You can connect any of the U-Blox devices with USB ports to the Nano (or any Linux host) without any special drivers. My NTP server is a Jetson NX (basically the same as a Nano) with a ZED-F9P. It’ll show up as /dev/ttyACMx. If you have Wine installed on your Nano, you can even run U-Blox’s u-center app (https://www.u-blox.com/en/product/u-center) to do advanced configuration. The gpsd, gpsrinex and rtklib utils all work fine.