The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need for smart, touchless, and reduced-contact shopping solutions, implemented either at the point of sale or through surveillance infrastructure. This has piqued interested in embedded AI technology, but to transform that interest into deployments, edge system OEMs and integrators need solutions that are high performance, with flexible connectivity, and designed to withstand varied commercial operating environments.

The compact NX215B from AVerMedia is an AI Box PC that checks those boxes. Built on the high-performance NVIDIA® Jetson™ Xavier™ NX module, the NX215B delivers 21 TOPS of computing performance with the host running at 15 or 20 W and 14 TOPS at 10 W on the strength of a 384-core NVIDIA Volta™ GPU with 48 Tensor Cores and a six-core NVIDIA Carmel Armv8 CPU. And all in a compact 126 mm (W) x 96 mm (L) x 74 mm (H) housing.

Although it’s designed to support cloud-native development, the fanless AVerMedia NX215B can be deployed in 0ºC to 60ºC temperatures at the edge to capture, analyze, and execute video analytics for smart retail, smart city, and other use cases that require contactless interaction.

The NX215B AI Box PC in Action

To support drop-in installation, the NX215B must also support a range of networking and connectivity technologies that exist at the edge. Therefore, AVerMedia has designed in I/O ports including:

2x 2 Lane MIPI CSI-2
1x 4 Lane MIPI CSI-2
MIPI Camera Input (internal) for optional accessories like the Raspberry Pi Camera v2
2x 4Kp60 HDMI output
2x GbE RJ-45
1x USB 2.0 Micro-B (for recovery)
3x USB 3.0 Type-A (1x internal).
1x M.2. key E 2230 for Wi-Fi
20-Pin Expansion Header

These interfaces combine with the performance of the Jetson Xavier NX to enable real-time edge processing and response. For added reliability, an RTC battery and battery life monitoring MCU are onboard as well.

The 1 kg NX215B AI Box PC is CE, FCC, and KC certified.

Getting Started with the AVerMedia NX215B AI Box PC

Developers can get started with the AVerMedia NX125B by downloaded NVIDIA’s JetPack SDK, which contains a ton of libraries and utilities for accelerating the creation of advanced vision applications. On the services side, AVerMedia can also design an AI carrier board for the Jetson Xavier NX and develop custom BSPs for applications with unique design requirements.

An overview of AVerMedia’s NX215B can be found at https://professional.avermedia.com/box-pc/nx215b-box-pc.