I feel like we made some good progress last week. The jtop: The Ultimate Tool for Monitoring NVIDIA Jetson Devices article and video is the first “how to” article of the year. Baby steps to get back in the game!
The Idea Shelf is a place to keep some of the great ideas that I’ve run across on the web. The first entry is Bret Victor – WorryDream is a website which feels like trying to drink water out of a fire hose. There are some great ideas there! Definitely worth taking the time to explore.
The website adds a place to house the older newsletters that we have sent out. This area will usually have all of the newsletters except for the latest one. To get the latest one directly into your inbox, subscribe to the Jetson Hacks Newsletter. Newsletters are sent out once or twice a month. I wrote a new one, and put it on the shelf just this time. There are now a couple newsletters in the archive:
Two Steps Forward, One Back
We have been making good progress the last couple of weeks. Articles, blog posts, ideas, videos. Cleaning up the website means it’s much easier to organize. Everything in it’s place, as it were. Website traffic up 10%. Life be good.
I think a good next step is to fix up some of the videos that have gotten long in the tooth. One subject is running a Jetson from a SSD. On the surface, that would seem easy …
As a “Be bold” strategy, the plan is to upgrade a Jetson Xavier NX to JetsonPack 5.1 and boot it from a NVMe. Article and Video. Since the new Jetson Orin NX and Nano support only this method, me figures that’s the way to go.
I fire up the laptop, and place the Xavier NX into recovery mode. The NVIDIA SDK Manager tells me that I need to upgrade. That seems about right. I go through the upgrade process of version 1.8.4 to 1.9.1 (let’s say I’m not a fan), and eagerly await the brave, new world. Here it is:
No SDKs for you!
Let’s say I have a love/hate relationship with the SDK Manager. I love to hate it. OK, start again.
First apt purge the sdkmanager. Second, remove the hidden folder ~.nvsdkm. Let’s see if 1.9.0 works. Install that from the .deb file. Nope. OK. Look through the logs. There seems to be trouble with downloading files. Each file prefix starts with https:/ instead of https:// in the log. That has to be a logging error, right? The prefix error is part of the logging, I’m guessing. If it was the actual file name, then nothing would ever work. That would be an obvious issue. Certainly I would not be the first to find it.
Trying the Tricks
There’s always lots of tricks to try. Some are superstitions. Rebooting between installs seems to help a good amount of the time. Getting rid of caches, going through log files. Checking the /etc/hosts file. All sorts of tricks. In this case, I couldn’t get it to work.
A little more back story. I remember now that on the original 1.8.4 install SDK Manager indicated that a newer version is available. When I tried to update, it said it could not find it. So I installed 1.9.1 manually. Ain’t my first rodeo with SDK Manager/Jet Pack Installer.
No Bueno
Here in Southern California, there’s the slang term “No Bueno” meaning no good. Realizing that my new dream of upgrading to 1.9.1 was at stake, I reinstalled 1.8.4.
Works perfectly, of course. The world isn’t stopping completely. The 1.8.4 SDK Manager tells me that there is a new version available. 1.9.1. That seem like a good idea. I hit the upgrade button, and this time everything goes smoothly. 1.9.1 installs itself. I’m pretty happy at this point, everything is as it should be. The SDK Manager relaunches:
Maybe It’s Me
I’m telling myself that February 2nd is Groundhog Day, if you have seen the movie. But I appear to be stuck in some sort of horrible upgrade loop here. While this little story only takes a few minutes to read, rest assured that this has been going on for several hours. I may have been swearing a little. It ain’t over yet.
Here’s the thing. Everyday I read about these great break through in computer hardware and software. These great machines that will change our everyday lives, and maybe even replace us! I will say that they have changed our lives, we spend more time doing updates than anything else. Plus, the updates don’t seem to have any benefit.
Sure, most machines work great for a little while. Then there’s this software “update” cycle which is the death spiral of any given machine. I have a Sonos speaker which bricked itself during an update, never to be heard from again.
Another thing to note is that this is typical in any development cycle. My experience is that people use 20 percent of development time fixing things that have no right to be broken. If you don’t plan this into your project, then it’s not realistic.
Sigh.
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