Five (5) Raspberry Pi 5 and Three Nvidia Jetson
Naming Servers
Five Raspberry Pi 5s you’ve got enough to lay down a really clean, enterprise-style foundation.
Instead of everything piled on one board, you can split duties and keep the system balanced and resilient.
Here’s a solid role map for your five Raspberry Pi 5 boards:
Note.. all to have coolers, mounting boards and the SSD.
Enterprise Decisions - Leadership
Pi-1 → "Enterprise"
- Runs k3s master (or Docker Swarm manager).
- Handles orchestration, scheduling, cluster API.
- Light services only (don’t bog it down).
- Static IP: 192.168.x.11
- Hostname: pi-ctrl-1
Communications
Pi-2 → "Communications"
- Mosquitto (MQTT broker) → backbone for Jetsons, CrowPi, sensors.
- NATS or RabbitMQ if you want event bus.
- Node-RED → drag-and-drop flows.
- Static IP: 192.168.x.12
- Hostname: pi-msg
Database, SSD and Memory (Micro SD)
Pi-3 → "Storage"
- Postgres (telemetry, configs).
- pgAdmin for GUI management.
- Can also run lightweight TimescaleDB if you want time-series metrics.
- Keep storage on USB-SSD or NVMe.
- Static IP: 192.168.x.13
- Hostname: pi-db
Administration
Pi-4 → "Administration
- Prometheus + Node Exporter for metrics.
- Grafana for dashboards.
- Optional: Loki (log aggregation) if you want full monitoring stack.
- Connect CrowPi screen → run dashboard kiosk mode.
- Static IP: 192.168.x.14
- Hostname: pi-obs
Engineering
Pi-5 → "Engineering"
- MinIO object store → for backups, logs, AI artifacts.
- pg_dump nightly to USB SSD.
- I/O gateway role: GPIO, Zigbee, Modbus, CAN bus dongles.
- Can double as VPN/WireGuard gateway for secure remote access.
- Static IP: 192.168.x.15
- Hostname: pi-store
Why This Layout Works
- 3-node quorum (Pi-1, Pi-2, Pi-3) → stable k3s control plane.
- Jetsons join as workers, only run heavy AI inference.
- Pi-4 & Pi-5 → special-purpose nodes (metrics + storage/backup + edge I/O).
- If one Pi dies → cluster still works, you don’t lose data or dashboards.
With this, your 5 Pis become the brains + memory of the empire, while the Jetsons are the muscle.
Jetson Node Layout
Jetson-1 → “Vision”
- Role: Computer vision + perception
- Workloads:
- Object detection (YOLOv8/YOLOv11, SSD, Faster R-CNN).
- Real-time video stream processing from cameras (RTSP/IP cams).
- OpenCV pipelines, facial/object recognition, motion tracking.
- Cluster Label: role=vision
- Static IP: 192.168.x.101
- Hostname: jetson-vision
Jetson-2 → “Language”
- Role: Natural language + audio AI
- Workloads:
- LLM inference (GPT-like models, LLaMA variants, Phi, Mistral).
- ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) with Whisper.
- TTS (text-to-speech) and dialog agents.
- Smart reply assistant for forums / MQTT / dashboards.
- Cluster Label: role=language
- Static IP: 192.168.x.102
- Hostname: jetson-language
Jetson-3 → “Control”
- Role: Decision, planning, reinforcement, analytics
- Workloads:
- Model-based decision engines (RL, trajectory planners).
- Edge ML for scheduling, anomaly detection, predictive maintenance.
- AI governor / orchestration of workloads (when Pi rules need GPU help).
- Can serve as a “shared overflow GPU” for jobs that don’t fit Vision/Language.
- Cluster Label: role=control
- Static IP: 192.168.x.103
- Hostname: jetson-control
How They Integrate
- Each Jetson joins your k3s cluster as a GPU worker node.
- Pis schedule jobs → Jetsons execute.
- Example flow:
- Camera sensor → Pi MQTT → Jetson-1 (Vision) → detects event.
- Result → MQTT → Jetson-2 (Language) → generates report or transcript.
- Jetson-3 (Control) → logs, prioritizes, or triggers actuators via Pi-5 gateway.
Big Picture
- 5 Pis = Brains / Spine (MQTT, DB, dashboards, backups, automation).
- 3 Jetsons = Muscle (Vision, Language, Control).
- You now have an 8-node mini-datacenter — balanced between orchestration and inference.
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