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cpgxiiitoday at 8:14 PM2 repliesview on HN

> The hardware is built around a stackable 10×10cm compute module with two ARM Cortex-A55 SBCs — one for ROS 2 navigation/EKF localisation, one dedicated to vision/YOLO inference — connected via a single ethernet cable.

I will preface this by saying that I have nothing against ARM per se, that my employer/team supported a good chunk of the work for making ROS 2 actually work on arm64, and that there is some good hardware out there.

I really don't understand why startups and research projects keep using weird ARM SBCs for their robots. The best of these SBCs is still vastly shittier in terms of software support and stability than any random Chinese Intel ADL-N box. The only reasons to use (weird) ARM SBCs in robots are that either (1) you are using a Jetson for Jetson things (i.e. Nvidia libraries), or (2) you have a product which requires serious cost optimization to be produced at a large scale. Otherwise you are just committing yourselves and your users/customers to a future of terrible-to-nonexistent support and adding significantly to the amount of work you need to bring up the new system and port existing tools to it.


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schaefertoday at 8:28 PM

> The only reasons to use ARM SBCs in robots are...

Obviously, anyone can have there own opinion on this. I work in robotics, we are quite happy with our A53 and M4. Though, we use a SOM, not a SBC, if you feel like splitting hairs.

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Sabreestoday at 8:17 PM

If you can send me an open hardware Intel, or Jetson I'd happily use it.

Part of the point of this for me is to see what's possible with open hardware (down to chip level at least)

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