How I Learn (For the Long Term)

I enjoy learning how other people learn. Their ideas are battle-tested, cohesive, and manageable — at least to them. Experimenting with their ideas helps me stick to practical advice and find what works with my own approaches. In fact, I’ve been using a few new habits over the summer that I think they are worth sharing and could be worth your time to try.

I’ve focused on developing habits that identify and close gaps in understanding while helping internalize knowledge for the long-term. These goals hit directly what I want out of learning: to understand topics the low-level details to the high-level abstractions and to retain it all for the long-term.

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CSI Cameras on the TX2 (The Easy Way)

I love Nvidia’s new embedded computers. The Nvidia Jetson embedded computing product line, including the TK1, TX1, and TX2, are a series of small computers made to smoothly run software for computer vision, neural networks, and artificial intelligence without using tons of energy. Better yet, their developer kits can be used as excellent single board computers, so if you’ve ever wished for a beefed up Raspberry Pi, this is what you are looking for. I personally use the Jetson TX2, which is the most powerful module available and is widely used.

One of the big fallbacks with Jetson devices is that the documentation does not (and cannot) cover all use cases. The community has yet to mature to the point where you can find some random blog’s guide on any random thing you need to do (à la Raspberry Pi and Arduino), so you’ll often have to figure out things for yourself.

But, I am here to dispell the mystery around at least one thing — using CSI cameras on your TX2. These methods should work on other Jetson devices too!

We’re going to look at utilizing the Jetson’s image processing powers and capturing video from the TX2’s own special CSI camera port. Specifically, I’ll show you:

Why you’d even want a CSI camera.
Where to get a good CSI camera.
How to get high resolution, high framerate video off your CSI cameras using gstreamer and the Nvidia multimedia pipeline.
How to use that video in OpenCV and ROS.

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