On the inevitable quest of finding the ultimate edge SBC, I came across this contraption. This is a Turing Pi 2.5 Mini-ITX cluster with 4 slots that currently contain a Turing RK1, a Jetson Orin Nano 8GB and two Jetson Orin NX 16GBs.
Why?
Partially because when I was 6, IBM released the IBM PC in hopes that perhaps people at home would consider owning a personal computer. I’ve been building PCs ever since, and this little cluster is just a really cool new addition.
Partially because I’m not on team cloud, and this kind of hardware has the potential to run pretty complicated things locally.
Partially because we will need good understanding and advice on what kind of hardware would be capable and affordable enough for the Mind Children robots.
The Turing RK1 is based on the Rockchip RK3588, the older and bigger Chinese brother of the Raspberry Pi5. It has 8 cores, 32GB, and a 6 TOPS NPU. It’s approx. 4 times faster than a Pi5.
The Jetsons run at 67 TOPS (Orin Nano 8GB) and 275 TOPS (Orin NX 16GB), which is serious deep learning inference prowess for your favorite LLMs or classification models.
It takes a bit of linux terminal starening to install everything the way you want to, and the provided installation guides can be somewhat challenging. I would say, it took about 3 days of flashing, restarting, replugging, swearing, and more flashing, until I could comfortably open SSH connections to the nodes running Ubuntu 24.04. More about this in future posts.
And the names of the nodes?
I mean, I could have gone for john, paul, george and ringo… But I’m not a Beatles-fan. Or john, john, jimmy and robert, but let’s face it, having two nodes with the same name can be very confusing for DNS servers. Further contemplation also included leonardo, donatello, raphael and michelangelo, and even sporty, scary, baby and posh…
But after even more deliberation, I finally settled for the far more reasonable hannibal, face, ba and murdock.