It feels like yesterday when the Raspberry Pi foundation released the first-in-line Single Board Computer (SBC) to the market. Back in 2012, Raspberry Pi wasn't alone in the SBC growing market, however, it was the first to make a community-based product that brings the hardware and the software eco-system to a beautiful harmony on the internet.
Before those days, embedded Linux based SBC's and SOM's were a place for Linux kernel and embedded hardware experts, no easy-to-use tools, ready Linux based distros, or most importantly without the enormous amount of questions and answers across the internet on anything related.
Today, 8 years later, the "2012 revolution" happens again
This time, it took a year to understand the impact of the new 'kid' in the market, but now, there are a few indications that defiantly build the route to a revolution.
The Raspberry Pi was the first to make embedded Linux easy while keeping the advantages of reliability and flexibility in terms of fitting to different kinds of industries applications. It's almost impossible to ignore the variety of industries where Raspberry Pi is in its hurt of products to save time-to-market and costs.
The power of this magical board leans on the software side: The Raspberry Pi foundation and their community, worked hard across the years to improve and share their knowledge, but, at the same time, without notice or targeting, they brought the Pi development to an extremely "serverless" level.
The Nvidia Jetson Nano
Let's stop the talking on the Raspberry Pi and focus on today's industry needs to understand better why the new kid in town is here to change the market of IoT and smart products forever.
Why do we need to thanks Nvidia and the Jetson Nano?
The market is going forward. AI, Robotics, amazing-looking screen app Gui's, image processing, and long data calculations are all become the new standard of smart edge products.
If a few years ago, you would only want to connect your product to the cloud and receive anything valuable, today, product managers and developers compete in a much tougher industry era.
This time, the Raspberry Pi can't be the technology hero again, its resources are limited and the eco-system starts to squint to a better-fit solution.
The Jetson Nano is the first single board computer to understand the necessary combination that will drive new prodcuts to use it. It's the first SBC designed in the mind of industrial powerful use cases, while not forgetting the prototyping stage and the harmony that gave the Raspberry Pi their success.
It's the first solution to bring the whole package for developers and for hardware engineers with a "SaaS" feel: The OS is already perfect thanks to Ubuntu, there is plenty of software instructions by Nvidia and open-source ready-to-use tools custom made for the Jetson family, and for the hardware engineers: they are free to go with the System On Module (SOM) that is connected to a carrier board which includes all the necessary outputs and inputs to make the development stage even faster.
The Jetson Nano combination is basically providing the first world infrastructure for producing a "2020" product with complex software while working in a minimal budget and time-to-market.
The Jetson Nano enables developers and product managers to imagine further without compromises, bringing tough software missions to the edge easily.