Jetbot expansion board

I’m buying a second board to replace the one that burned out immediately after the warranty period expired. The customer service is terrible. In the end, I had to fix everything myself. It's time to throw away this robot, because... it takes more time to fix.

A good piece of technology. Makes things easier to understand when connecting servo's for the Jetson Nano Robot because they have dedicated connection points. The motors on the robots are 12v so you cannot power them off the 5v power supply. This does complicate things because the external board takes a 12v battery input which can power the board and the Jetson Nano computer HOWEVER I have found that the battery is not powerful enough to do this optimally so I see significant performance drop off on the GPU cores for the Jetson Nano computer because its effectively being under powered.

I would have to upgrade the battery module quite some bit to overcome this problem which is more money.

Overall I recommend it but be aware of the above when making the decision.

I purchased the jetbot 4 months ago and it has been nothing short of a headache. Let me explain, when I purchased it and opened the contents it was missing the tf card for booting the environment, nano image, and jetbot image and the lcd module for the up address . That was the beginning of my robotic nightmare. I contacted the customer support and they gave me instructions to download flash and install the images. Unless your a computer scientist than the instructions are extremely vague and give little to no organization of steps. If you are not a beginner than you may have better luck but as a customer I was under the impression this would be more user friendly from the discription on Amazon. This is not for children to learn coding. This is for more advanced users who are familiar with the nvidia jetson nano developers kit , Linux, swapping files, creating images and it’s need for exact dependencies and corresponding programs to run the cores and gpu. This is not a toy. You will crash your nvidia jetson nano over and over again if you do not take significant amount of time and effort to learn the main component/OS first. That alone will be enough to drive anyone crazy due to the scattered documentation on nvidia side. Back to the missing things. Never once was I offered replacement items so I spent weeks trying to figure out the image problem and the up address and the instructions and the……. The list goes on. I needed up buying a new extension board because the one that came with the jetbot burned out somehow. Iv purchased 7 sd cards. Had to Oder the led module but can’t find great documentation du to the dependencies problem and the fact that the jetbot runs on its own. Why even need the nano? Anyways I finally, after months got it to load and semi configured. I say semi because so far iv only been able to use the camera. Long story long unless you can build packages, know Linux, know the Jetpack platoform, know AI and it’s structural needs, know robotics already and how to operate pins and coding m, know virtual environments, don’t need instructions , and have a ton of extra money to spend to cover yahbooms failure to replace missing parts , than maybe don’t get this. I’m saving you a ton of time and money. Did I mention I’m a proccess engineer?