Connecting to the Jetson

You’ll need to login to your Jetson many times to setup and run software. Out of the box, your Jetson will have a default user account called avr with a password of bellavr22.

Here are 3 possible methods you can use.

Monitor and Keyboard

Possibly the simplest way to connect to your Jetson is with a monitor and keyboard. You’ll just need a monitor that has HDMI or DisplayPort that you can plug in to the Jetson.

Once at the desktop, you can open a terminal by clicking the application launcher in the bottom left (the 9 squares) or with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+t.

Serial

If you do not have a monitor and keyboard, another method of logging in to your Jetson is over a serial connection. To do this, you’ll need a serial client.

Installing Serial Client

Installing Serial Client on Windows

For Windows, we recommend PuTTy. Go to this page and download and install the putty-64bit-<version>-installer.msi file.

Download this installer file

Run through the setup wizard

Installing Serial Client on MacOS

Rather than using PuTTy, it’s much easier to open a terminal and simply run:

screen ttyACM0 115200

Installing Serial Client on Linux

You can follow the same steps as on MacOS (after installing screen with sudo apt install screen), but if you like a GUI, you can install PuTTy with:

sudo apt install putty

and launch PuTTy with:

sudo putty

Connecting to Jetson via Serial Client

Now, if you want to power the Jetson via USB (if the Jetson is not connected to a wall adapter or a battery) remove the jumper behind the barrel jack.

Plug in a MicroUSB cable to the Jetson,

and then into your computer.

Open up PuTTy, choose the COM port or the serial device /dev/ttyACM0 for the Serial line, and put in 115200 as speed.

Click “Open”. You should now see the Jetson’s terminal.

SSH

In the future, you’ll want to use SSH to login to your Jetson, as it is far more convenient. SSH is way to login to a Linux system over a network. However, to do so, you’ll need to know the IP address of your Jetson. The simplest way to figure this out if you don’t know is to login via serial, and then run the command

ifconfig eth0

if you’ve connected the Jetson to ethernet or

ifconfig wlan0

if you’ve connected the Jetson to WiFi.

If you have yet to connect your jetson to the WiFi you can follow instructions for connecting to internet prior to returning to connect through ssh.

ssh Command

The quickest way to login to yor Jetson over SSH, is to use the builtin ssh command in Windows. Open up a command prompt or PowerShell, and run

ssh <user>@<ip>

The first time you log in to your Jetson, you’ll be prompted to accept the host’s key. Enter yes. You’ll thenbe prompted for your password, and then you’ll be put into a terminal.

Command line SSH login

PuTTy

If you’re not comfortable with the command line, you can install PuTTy to connect over SSH. Select the “SSH” button in PuTTy, put in the hostname field <user>@<ip> and then click the “Open” button.

PuTTy SSH Login

Secondary popup window

You’ll need to accept that you trust a key the first time.

Accept the key

SSH Troubleshooting

Connection closed/reset

If you try to SSH into your Jetson, and you immediately get a connection timed out error, here’s how to fix it.

First, login to your Jetson via serial. Run the command

tail /var/log/auth.log

and see that you’re getting errors about invalid formats:

Jun 28 18:42:26 drone sshd[8547]: error: key_load_private: invalid format
Jun 28 18:42:26 drone sshd[8547]: error: key_load_public: invalid format
Jun 28 18:42:26 drone sshd[8547]: error: Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key
Jun 28 18:42:26 drone sshd[8547]: error: key_load_private: invalid format
Jun 28 18:42:26 drone sshd[8547]: error: key_load_public: invalid format
Jun 28 18:42:26 drone sshd[8547]: error: Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key
Jun 28 18:42:26 drone sshd[8547]: fatal: No supported key exchange algorithms [preauth]

If so, run the command

sudo /usr/bin/ssh-keygen -A

to generate a new host key.