Jetson Tk1 randomly fails to boot

Hello all,

Forgive me-- I’m a bit of a newbie to Linux and embedded systems so I might have stupid questions.

I’ve been doing work with ROS on the Jetson. Twice, at seemingly random times, the board has failed to boot. Or rather, all the data at the beginning of the boot sequence scrolls by, the Nvidia logo shows, and then the screen goes black. The LED on the display is green, meaning that there’s data in the HDMI, but no GUI shows up. I’ve re-flashed the EMMC twice, and this always fixes it, but obviously that’s not a very good solution. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Can you log in over the nerwork with SSH to check the logs?

Also, does the serial console work during this time? If so, you can watch the logs in real time when this is going on.

How would I access the serial console? Through the MicroUSB port?

The DB-9 connector is an RS-232 serial port. You can either use this directly (probably a “NULL modem” cable) between Jetson and host, or you could get a serial USB cable (this is typically what I use); this is USB on the host, but a DB-9 connector to Jetson in a single inexpensive cable.

Then use a serial console app, e.g., minicom or gtkterm (PuTTY in windows). Settings: speed 115200, 8N1, probably use XON/XOFF flow control.

Silly me, I didn’t see that connector. I’ll try that next time the problem occurs.