Board Automation

The NVIDIA® Jetson AGX Xavier™ and NVIDIA® Jetson AGX Orin™ developer kit carrier boards each have a micro USB port that you can use for board automation and UART debug output.

You can control a Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit carrier board with an integrated board automation solution called TOPO. TOPO connects to the host PC via a full-speed USB interface. Through this interface the host PC can:

  • Communicate with the NVIDIA® Jetson™ UART port

  • Automate commands like power on, power off, reset, and recovery

You can control a Jetson AGX Xavier Developer Kit carrier board with its integrated FTDI chip, which has similar capabilities.

Host System Setup

These instructions are for users of Ubuntu 18.04 or Ubuntu 20.04, but can be adapted for other distributions.

The software for interacting with the target carrier board can be found in Linux_for_Tegra/tools/board_automation/.

To eliminate the need to use sudo to interact with the carrier board, NVIDIA recommends that you create a udev rule:

  • To create a udev rule for a Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit target:

    1. Add the following into /etc/udev/rules.d/99-mcurule.rules:

      SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0955", ATTRS{idProduct}=="7045", GROUP="plugdev", TAG+="uaccess"

    2. Reload rules:

      $ sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

  • To create a udev rule for a Jetson AGX Xavier Developer Kit target:

    1. Add the following into /etc/udev/rules.d/99-mcurule.rules:

      SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0403", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6011", GROUP="plugdev", TAG+="uaccess"

    2. Reload rules:

      $ sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

Basic Board Control

Following are some examples that demonstrate typical uses of the boardctl script to help you get started. You can run them as shown from Linux_for_Tegra/, the directory in which you normally execute the flash script.

Note that the power_on and recovery commands implicitly power cycle the target.

For Jetson AGX Orin

  • Recovery: power off, force recovery, and power on:

    $ ./tools/board_automation/boardctl -t topo recovery

  • Power off:

    $ ./tools/board_automation/boardctl -t topo power_off

  • Power off, then power on:

    $ ./tools/board_automation/boardctl -t topo power_on

  • Reset (no effect on power state):

    $ ./tools/board_automation/boardctl -t topo reset

For Jetson AGX Xavier series

  • Recovery: power off, force recovery, and power on:

    $ ./tools/board_automation/boardctl -t pm342 recovery

  • Power off:

    $ ./tools/board_automation/boardctl -t pm342 power_off

  • Power off, then power on:

    $ ./tools/board_automation/boardctl -t pm342 power_on

  • Reset (no effect on power state):

    $ ./tools/board_automation/boardctl -t pm342 reset

NVIDIA also provides a Python library for interacting with the FTDI chip, which can be found at https://github.com/NVIDIA/python-jetson.

UART Access

For NVIDIA® Jetson AGX Orin™, TOPO exposes four serial ports named /dev/ttyACM<n>. For Jetson AGX Xavier series, the FTDI chip exposes three serial ports named /dev/ttyUSB<n>.

Use the following commands to determine which serial port supports the TOPO or FTDI console. For the correct port, the commands display values similar to the ones shown.

  • For Jetson AGX Orin:

$ sudo udevadm info -q all -n /dev/ttyACM0 | grep -E "(ID_MODEL|ID_VENDOR)"
E: ID_VENDOR_ID=0955
E: ID_MODEL_ID=7045
E: ID_VENDOR_FROM_DATABASE=NVIDIA Corp.
E: ID_VENDOR=NVIDIA
E: ID_VENDOR_ENC=NVIDIA
E: ID_MODEL=Tegra_On-Platform_Operator
E: ID_MODEL_ENC=Tegra\x20On-Platform\x20Operator

  • For Jetson AGX Xavier series:

$ sudo udevadm info /dev/ttyUSB5 | grep -E "(ID_MODEL|ID_VENDOR)"
E: ID_MODEL=Quad_RS232-HS
E: ID_MODEL_ENC=Quad\x20RS232-HS
E: ID_MODEL_FROM_DATABASE=FT4232H Quad HS USB-UART/FIFO IC
E: ID_MODEL_ID=6011
E: ID_VENDOR=FTDI
E: ID_VENDOR_ENC=FTDI
E: ID_VENDOR_FROM_DATABASE=Future Technology Devices International, Ltd
E: ID_VENDOR_ID=0403

The console port is physically connected to UART3 (the debug UART). Typical usage is:

$ minicom -D /dev/ttyACM0