USB device not detected as USB 3.0 on TX2 custom carrier board

I am using a custom carrier board (blackboard-tx2) on balenaCloud, and attempting to use a RealSense camera over USB 3.0 port. The carrier board device has been added to balenaCloud, and the DTB file is working, as the DTB file is required to power up the USB ports. When I use the TX2 developer board with a jetson using our DTB, the device is detected as USB3. Likewise, Using stock ubuntu and our DTB on the TX2 modules, the cameras are detected as USB3.

Is there some way to either force devices into USB3 mode, or is there some kind of problem going on from my end?

I think I’ve worked it out, ODMDATA was not set in the configuration file.

Hi @sebastien , is this working for you now? Which configuration file did you need to add that config to?

Needs ODMDATA ?= "0x7090000" added on the second last line.

If I push this now and make a pull request, how long will it take for it to make it into staging/production?

Additionally, Is it possible to change device types once they have been provisioned?

I have found that the n510 board has the correct ODMDATA set. Can we flash the devices with this image, and then update it to an image with our BSP once the update is available in production?

Unfortunately there is not a easy way to change device type once devices are deployed. On how long it will take for the code to reach staging, depends. But once the code is merged, it should be in staging in a week and production in a week or two after that, depending on how well the testing cycle goes.

Is there a way to change ODMDATA myself from the SD card once I’ve flashed balena.img to it?

Unfortunately I’m not fully versed on this and if its possible, looking around, it seems its something other people have been discussing here: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1029147/jetson-tx2/modifying-usb-lane-allocation-odmdata-without-complete-flash/ but its seems the nvidia forum is currently not loading :frowning:

One thing to note is that any alterations of the OS image that is not done from a container will most likely be overwritten or lost during OS updates as our backend is not aware of those changes, so your OS updates would revert these changes whenever it updates/

Yeah, basically I need the changes to be in in the next few days. If we can manually apply the ODMDATA changes and the next release will contain those changes, then there is no issue if the local changes are overwritten.

Unfortunately there is not a easy way to change device type once devices are deployed.

Does this mean that there is a way to change device type, but it isn’t easy?

Yeah, that could/should work assuming the changes are added to the image and doesn’t affect other users using the same image type (I assume it shouldn’t?) .

Yes, I believe the balena fleetOps team have done it for some of our customers, but its invasive and needs to manually alter the database, so if its avoidable it is definitely better as its needs specialised work from our team and working with us to transition.

No one else is using the image (we added it as a community supported image and are the only users of our carrier board). It looks like trying to manually edit the ODMDATA looks too involved to make work properly.

We are doing our first deployment of 10 units on Monday and we must ship then. Manually flashing devices once installed will be very difficult. If I could get in touch with the fleetOps team to discuss the option of changing the device type in deployment that would be a huge help to us, especially as we have deployments of 40-100 devices coming up in the next few months. Being able to properly test balena in production would be really useful.

@sebastien if the PR is made on the community board, I can try push the devices team to get it released into staging a bit sooner, but monday will be tight. The fleetOps team generally only works with paid customers as they are in heavy demand unfortunately, but I can ask our customer success team to reach out to you and perhaps we can organise an exception for your project if you would like?

Already made the pull request here https://github.com/balena-os/balena-jetson-tx2/pull/146

If the customer success team could get in touch with me that would be great. I will also stay up late tonight or get up early tomorrow (I’m based in Australia) to contact Jordan about this too.

Thanks for your help.