Looks like the VEX AI kit for high stakes is out of stock and there isn’t a timeline posted on the page saying when it will be back. Some teams have said the kit has been out of stock since august. Is there any estimate as to when the kit will be back in stock for VEX AI teams, or is there any way current AI teams can get expedited orders?
Supply chain issues with the jetson nano dev kit.
Is it expected that these issues will be resolved or is this more or less the end of the line for this version of the kit? I did some googling and found this which says the kits were discontinued almost 11 months ago.
Basically, should VEX AI teams continue to wait for this kit to come back in stock or should they run this season with their own sourced hardware?
I’m also watching this. The recommended “replacement” is the Jetson Orin Nano Developer kit.
at about $500. But it’s had some bad press from the development community about NVIDIA support for it. It looks like NVIDIA put lots of time and effort in the first Jetson Nano rollout and developers loved it. Not so much for the Orin boards. People were expecting the Raspberry Pi experience where it just works, to get doesn’t work that way.
On the positive side they don’t EOL until 2032. So if AI gets set up and running on Orin, we can get 6 solid years out of the hardware.
VEX had a pretty decent software bundle that was about as turn key as you could get, it may take them time to get it moved over. All of my usual suspects to buy the older one (Seeed Studio, Digikey, Waveshare) are all showing discontinued.
Speaking candidly, for as much as Vex likes to recommend teams that want to use 3D Printing, AI, advanced building techniques, etc. to compete in VexAI, there is an astounding lack of support for the competition format. 5 Tournaments currently listed on RobotEvents, all in mid-2025.
It looks like Seeed Studio has a jetson-nano devkit-like system in a 3d printed shell: Amazon.com
It might be missing the barrel jack connector so teams would probably have to figure out their own method of actually powering the unit. It’s also $200 instead of $99 
, but that might be more palatable than the Orin Nano, and I would expect that it should be compatible straight away with the VEX provided AI SD card image? I’m not able to confirm unfortunately.
I gave up years ago on that concept. Nothing is ever
Easy any more. I have a board that is in a mini fig shape with a RP2040 on it, spin to the new RP chip is a nightmare on a pin compatible chip. It’s been that way for a while. I love PIC chips, but the move stuff around my on a regular basis both software and hardware. I feel Bob III and James pain.
So if I needed to buy a Jetson for Vex AI, which one should I buy? Would there be much of a difference between the discontinued Jetson Nano and the Jetson Orin in the way that it is set up?