NVIDIA Jetson Nano is a small AI computer which people often refer to it as “Raspberry Pi on steroids.” I received my Jetson Nano Developer Kit a few days ago and decided to build a small project with it: LEGO Minifigures object detection.

Setting up Jetson Nano was very easy, and NVIDIA provided a nice tutorial about it: “Getting Started With Jetson Nano Developer Kit.” Please note that you’ll need micro USB power supply and microSD card which are not included in Developer Kit. Also, I used standard Raspberry Pi v2 camera for this project.

After the initial setup and SD card image installation, I was able to boot Jetson Nano and log into the JupyterLab server on the device.

JupyterLab server running in “headless” mode

For this project I had to build a rotating platform and I decided to use LEGO Boost for it. My idea was to place LEGO Minifigures on top of the platform, fix the Raspberry Pi camera in front of it and rotate the platform at different speeds to test how Jetson Nano recognition works.

Platform base made with the LEGO Boost

The LEGO Boost application I had installed on my iPhone connects to the LEGO Brick via Bluetooth, and it allowed me to set different speeds for the motor that rotates on top of the platform. Before I placed the different LEGO Minifigures and other LEGO objects on top of the platform, I had to extend it a bit.

Platform top used to place LEGO Minifigures

I spent few hours searching the Internet for LEGO Minifigures pictures and manually annotated them in order to build my training dataset. I know what you’re thinking now, but someone had to do it for the science and Internet glory! 😉 I’ve set up an NVIDIA DIGITS instance on AWS, created the dataset, and trained my model.

Model training on NVIDIA DIGITS

In case you want to build a similar project with LEGO Minifigures, my trained model is available here. If you build something cool with it, feel free to let me know about it!

Finally, I transferred the model to Jetson Nano and I tested how it works. You can see it on the following video:

1280*720px @ 7.6 FPS

I made several tests with this setup and I’m happy with the Jetson Nano performance. The whole process of setting it up, training the model, and testing went smoothly. I would definitely recommend that you try it out if you want to build similar projects.

If you decide to buy Jetson Nano I suggest that you take NVIDIA’s “Getting Started with AI on Jetson Nano” course, which is free of charge. It’ll take you through several sample image classification and image regression projects, which are more than enough to get you started on your AI journey. Upon completion of this course you’ll receive a certificate:

NVIDIA Jetson Nano Certificate

For this project, special thanks goes to my son Jan who helped me out with assembling the LEGO Boost platform.

Thanks for reading, I hope you liked it!