What is the Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano (Developer Kit)?

Well, here it is!
Technically, it’s a mini computer with impressive AI capabilities, produced by Nvidia—and it’s out of stock almost everywhere. I was lucky enough to get my hands on one, thanks to my good friend Goran Vuksic, who kindly lent me his!

The “Yayaka” Project

“Yayaka” is the Greek word for “meemaw,” and the entire project is inspired by the needs of my grandmother, who is elderly and requires assistance with communication.
To help her, I wanted to build a device she could interact with—actively and/or passively—to improve her communication with unfamiliar people such as caregivers, nurses, and doctors.
This project holds both sentimental and technical value for me. It’s the very definition of learning by doing.

Part 1 – Giving the Jetson Orin Nano a Spin (Just Getting It Up and Running)

I ran the whole thing live, take a look

First things first: I needed to bring the Jetson to life. The simplest way was to flash a MicroSD card using balenaEtcher and the zipped image downloaded from Nvidia’s website. I used jp62-orin-nano-sd-card-image—a piece of cake!

I even managed to install ollama and run llama3.2 without any issues. A cool proof of concept—but of course, you can’t work miracles with a MicroSD card.
So, the next challenge was to swap the MicroSD for a 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD to give the system some breathing room. This is where I got stuck…

…to be continued