This is a sample newsletter. Sign up to get email delivery!
Hello there!
The holidays are over, and it’s time to get to work. Or at least so I thought. I’ll discuss that a little further along. I hope your New Year is going great so far!
News
The New Year starts with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang delivered the keynote
which brought several announcements that interest the Jetson community. Here are a couple of them.
Jetson Thor
This has been generally discussed as the successor to Jetson Orin. A little bit of the technology has been revealed. The GPU is a next generation NVIDIA Blackwell architecture. This will allow AI performance of 2,000 teraflops of 8-bit floating-point. CPU performance should increase as well, somewhere around 2.6X.
The memory capacity doubles that of the Orin, which will allow for more or larger models. The I/O bandwidth increases by a factor of 10. There’s also upgraded components, like a functional safety processor, a high-performance CPU cluster, and 100GB Ethernet. All the big boy stuff.
NVIDIA is working hard to get into the robotics market, and seem to want to be a leader in humanoid robot compute. There’s no announced release date, but typically NVIDIA will announce Jetson releases at the NVIDIA GPU Conference in March.
NVIDIA Cosmos
NVIDIA Cosmos is a comprehensive platform initiative to accelerate the development of physical AI systems, particularly for robotics and autonomous vehicles. NVIDIA intends to provide developers with tools, models and data pipelines to create sophisticated AI systems that can interact with the world. Here’s the NVIDIA blog post about it: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/advancing-physical-ai-with-nvidia-cosmos-world-foundation-model-platform/
There are several key components. A couple are worth mentioning which we can take advantage of almost immediately. The World Foundation Models (WFMs) provide autoregressive and diffusion models, and are available freely now on Github: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Cosmos
The second interesting set of models that NVIDIA released, also on GitHub: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Cosmos-Tokenizer, is a suite of image video neural tokenizers. It is one of the core components of NVIDIA Cosmos.
Rather than have me give a poor summary, take the time to go look at the website and read the papers. It’s the wave of the future.
Airjet PAK 5C-25
There was another interesting piece of tech shown at CES 2025. Frore Systems introduced the AirJet PAK 5C-25, a revolutionary vibrating piezo electric cooler designed for the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super AI module. This solid-state cooling solution boasts the ability to remove up to 25 Watts of heat, making it ideal for high-performance applications in harsh environments. With its compact size of 100 x 65 x 9.8 mm, the AirJet PAK 5C-25 is significantly smaller than traditional fan-based cooling systems and operates silently without any moving parts, enhancing both reliability and longevity. Its dust-proof and water-resistant features ensure it can withstand challenging industrial conditions where traditional cooling might fail.
Thermal solutions are very interesting, and to see a solid state solution like this could indicate some very interesting times ahead.
And Then …
As you recall from the last newsletter, I wanted to get back to writing more technically insightful content. Well, this isn’t that. Let me tell you the story …
On Tuesday, January 7, I woke up to a text from my neighbor. It was a bit breezy outside, and one of the parkway oak trees in front of my house had split in half, blocking his driveway. The tree was about 35 feet tall, and the fallen section was too large for me to move by hand. The city of Pasadena owns the parkway trees, so a quick call and a couple of hours later, the city had cleared the mess. At the time, the wind gusts were hitting 50 miles per hour (mph).
These winds are a phenomenon we call Santa Anas here in Los Angeles. A large high-pressure system builds over the desert to the northeast, sending winds through the mountain passes. When the pressure difference is large enough, the winds can reach hurricane force, but without the moisture that usually accompanies hurricanes. The relative humidity can drop to around 10%, which creates what we call fire weather. It’s common for Santa Ana events to occur several times a year, with varying intensity.
Later that morning, the Pacific Palisades fire broke out. Pacific Palisades is about 35 miles southwest of me, but still within Los Angeles County. A lot of firefighting resources were deployed to that fire, and the national news focused on it because it’s one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country, home to some of the most powerful and famous people. The movers and shakers.
To be clear, hurricane-force winds aren’t common in LA, but they do happen roughly every 10 years. One such event occurred in Brentwood in the 1930s, not far from where the Pacific Palisades fire is today.
Surprisingly, no one was talking about my oak tree splitting in half.
By evening, another fire had started in Eaton Canyon, just about 3 north east miles of me. The winds had picked up again, gusting to 100 mph. Eaton Canyon serves as the gateway to the foothills. Typically a Santa Ana wind would drive a fire up into the foothills and into the mountains. This time, however, the wind pattern was different, and the fire started moving west.
When the fire is raging and the winds are that strong, embers can travel miles, starting spot fires. That’s exactly what happened, and a second fire broke out in Altadena, more than two miles west of the original blaze.
At around 2 a.m., I was ordered to evacuate. I had spent the day preparing, so I just grabbed some Jetsons and clothes, threw them in the car, and headed out. With fallen trees, downed power lines blocking the roads, and limited visibility, it was more than a little scary.
You’ve probably heard the rest of the story. The Pacific Palisades fire destroyed more than 5,000 homes and structures, and Altadena lost over 4,000. The fire came within a quarter of a mile from my house. Thankfully, I only had smoke damage, but I know many people who lost everything. My cousin had a beautiful new home in the Palisades – gone in one bad day.
it’s hard not to think about how technology could have played a role—whether it was in predicting the wind patterns, managing resources more effectively, or even improving the firefighting process itself. But as much as we rely on technology to solve problems, the truth is that the challenges we face are far more complex. The fire, the infrastructure failures, and the strain on emergency services aren’t just problems that technology alone can solve. They point to a larger, systemic issue—one that demands more than just technological fixes.
A Technology View
As someone deeply interested in robotics, computers, and technology, it’s hard not to jump to the conclusion that we need a quick, high-tech solution like fire-fighting robots. But the truth is, the problem is far more systemic and involves many factors that a strictly technology-driven approach can’t fully solve.
The issues that became apparent during the fires in the Palisades and Eaton Canyon weren’t just about the lack of technology. They were about failures in infrastructure, preparedness, and logistics. In both fires, water pressure dropped so dramatically that fire hydrants became ineffective early on. In the Palisades fire, one major contributor was the 117-million-gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir, which had been emptied for maintenance before the fires started. This reservoir feeds water to the tanks that supply the hydrants. As firefighters used the water from the tanks, other backup systems couldn’t refill them quickly enough to keep up with demand.
Something similar had happened at the Eaton fire, though we’re still in early days to figure out exactly what. So if you don’t have water, then how are the fire fighting robots supposed to fight?
It’s easy to imagine a whole bunch of solutions. One would be robot planes that go get water from the ocean and do automated, pin point precision drops. Or houses that go into self protect mode when it senses it is in trouble. The house could bathe itself in fire repellent, or empty the contents of a backyard swimming pool on the roof.
There’s simple solutions, like keeping brush cleared, and then there’s complex technical solutions. The state of California and its cities are big on rules and regulations. Whenever you build anything here, from a small shed to a house, there are a bunch of hoops to jump through.
However, these are the same cities that rely on 100-year-old utility poles to deliver electricity, which often break and fall over during major wind events. The cities also have palm trees planted along the streets, which, as far as I can tell, act like 100-foot torches and ember emitters when they inevitably catch fire.
At the end of the day, technology alone won’t solve everything. The fires in the Palisades and Eaton Canyon showed just how much bigger the problem really is. Outdated infrastructure, unprepared systems, and the sheer scale of the challenge make it clear that we can’t rely on technology as a quick fix. If we want to make real progress, we need to address more than just the tech. We need to rethink how we build, prepare, and respond to the challenges of living in disaster-prone areas.
The post JetsonHacks Newsletter – January 2025 appeared first on JetsonHacks.
