Running TinyAutomator on NVIDIA Jetson

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TinyAutomator brings the power of Waylay automation technology to the edge. Now TinyAutomator which localises automation tasks has been combined with NVIDIA Jetson!

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Things used in this project

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Hardware components

NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit ×1

Software apps and online services

Waylay TinyAutomator

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Story

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NVIDIA Jetson is a complete System on Module (SOM) that includes a GPU, CPU, memory, and all that jazz, like power management and peripherals needed to be a complete development platform.

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Now if you get the NVIDIA Jetson Dev kit the System on Module comes plugged in a board covering all your IOs and useful other ports like HDMI, USB, and power plug via USB Type C.

All you need to get started is a keyboard&mouse and a monitor although in a pinch you could also set up the system over ssh even without those.

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The other great thing about the Jetson is that it runs Ubuntu on a 64 bit ARM architecture which means that most software developed for Linux is already compatible and easy to use via traditional methods if you already are used to a pc or laptop running a Debian environment.

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And because NVIDIA Jetson is such a great hardware development board to run things at the Edge, and if you have been following our tutorials you already know that TinyAutomator from Waylay is a great software solution for running things on the Edge we thought we need to run them together and thus this tutorial!

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Setting up the Jetson ⚙️

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The first thing after getting your Jetson out of the box is writing the OS on an SD card, be sure to get a 64GB at least so you have some spare storage space for local data besides the OS.

Based on your OS follow the steps from the dev site to accomplish this:

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https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-kit

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Then plug the SD card and connect your monitor and keyboard & mouse and boot it. Be sure to complete the Ubuntu setup and allow the installer to occupy all remaining space on your SD card when prompted.

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The following steps can be done either from this setup or remotely via ssh from the same network by removing the monitor, keyboard&mouse setup, In the end, it's a device running at the Edge so it should run accordingly and you should be able to access it remotely.

Next stop:

Installing TinyAutomator 🦉

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Waylay TinyAutomator community edition comes free of charge and provides the following features:

Console, inference engine, resource service
Serverless sandbox

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This provides you with a complete automation stack capable of ingesting data through REST or MQTT, defining rules and managing their lifecycle visually via the integrated low-code user interface, and triggering actuations from these rules based on data collected and processed by soft sensors.

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TinyAutomator comes prepacked in the form of a few docker images so the first step will be to have Docker running on the Jetson. You can learn all about it here https://docs-io.waylay.io/#/features/automator/.

Jetson Nano doesn’t come with Docker Compose installed by default. You will need to first install the below list of pre-requisite packages in the right order as shown below:

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sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip nano wget libssl-dev libhdf5-dev

We sneaked nano as a terminal editor useful when working remotely but you can use whatever you like on your end 😛.

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Run the following command to check if docker-compose has been installed successfully:

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docker-compose version

and then this one to allow dockers permission in the name of the current user:

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sudo usermod $USER -aG docker

After this command, you have to re-login to shell for the permissions to take action.

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Then use the following command to edit and add this line at the end of the file, it will help with accessing TinyAutomator from a browser afterward and also with its inner workings as well

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sudo nano /etc/hosts

Add this line:

127.0.0.1 localhost standalone.waylay.io pubsub-standalone.waylay.io

The file should look like this:

Now your system is ready to run a Waylay standalone platform. Download the docker-compose file for X86 platform from the URL https://tinyurl.com/waylay-fulltinyautomator:

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wget -O tinyautomator-x86.yml  https://tinyurl.com/waylay-fulltinyautomator

Start docker-compose with the downloaded file. This will start downloading and start up the docker images with the Waylay platform services and open some ports to access those services.

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docker-compose -f tinyautomator-x86.yml  up -d

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NOTE: It can take some time to download the docker images.

That's it, try accessing TinyAutomator by going in a browser to this address: http://standalone.waylay.io or http://localhost if you are running it directly from the Jetson:

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What’s next? 🚀

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Now that you have an NVIDIA Jetson running the TinyAutomator stack you can follow up our next tutorials for some real-world use cases or build your own automation based on them:

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Running TinyAutomator on NVIDIA Jetson