Hardware Issues & Fixes - overheating, rebooting and more.
Ryan
New Member Posts: 1 ✭
Morning all!
I have been doing some experimenting with the Up Squared N4200 4gb/32gb, and I am mostly impressed, however I came across a few caveats and came to provide fixes for those suffering with similar issues.
1) Boot rebooting randomly
Symptom - failing to start fully or rebooting when opening something, especially starting intensive applications such as chromium - ^@^@^@ corruption in logs where the system has aborted abruptly.
a) Long story short, the Up Squared is extremely sensitive to supply voltage. I recommend supplying between 5.1 and 5.2 volts, however you must ensure that the positive overshoot of your supply does not exceed 5.25 volts.
Your power supply should be able to handle fast transients - bear in mind that with the current transients that are exhibited, the cable that supplies the board has an impact and will exhibit losses.
The best way I found around this was to populate a small board with approximately 3 * 100 uF low ESR capacitors, and attach between the 5v and GND GPIO pins. DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU HAVE AN INNOVATOR BOARD - THE TRACKS WILL NOT HANDLE THIS - If this is the case you can attach this before the DC Barrel Jack.
2) Overheating
a) In my opinion the heat sink supplied doesn't do the best job when under heavy load (in turbo mode) - after 10 minutes it would reach critical thermal point and shut down. On my test set up I have insulated the top of the electronics except the die and clamped an aluminium block with thermal paste, which houses thermal pipes to a large, dense heatsink (approx 250mm x 120mm). This is just because it is what I have to hand, but anyone with access to a mill can make a nice big heat block which will solve this issue. Note not to over tighten the heatsink as the processor is sensitive to stress on the die.
With this set up I have achieved 50deg C at ambient temperature of 23 deg C under full load. 50 deg C is reached at approximately 25 minutes and maintains this temperature for the remainder of the test time (5 hours).
Staff, are you planning any revisions to resolve these issues, or is it left for the end user to supply a solution?
I hope that the rest of you find this helpful!
I have been doing some experimenting with the Up Squared N4200 4gb/32gb, and I am mostly impressed, however I came across a few caveats and came to provide fixes for those suffering with similar issues.
1) Boot rebooting randomly
Symptom - failing to start fully or rebooting when opening something, especially starting intensive applications such as chromium - ^@^@^@ corruption in logs where the system has aborted abruptly.
a) Long story short, the Up Squared is extremely sensitive to supply voltage. I recommend supplying between 5.1 and 5.2 volts, however you must ensure that the positive overshoot of your supply does not exceed 5.25 volts.
Your power supply should be able to handle fast transients - bear in mind that with the current transients that are exhibited, the cable that supplies the board has an impact and will exhibit losses.
The best way I found around this was to populate a small board with approximately 3 * 100 uF low ESR capacitors, and attach between the 5v and GND GPIO pins. DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU HAVE AN INNOVATOR BOARD - THE TRACKS WILL NOT HANDLE THIS - If this is the case you can attach this before the DC Barrel Jack.
2) Overheating
a) In my opinion the heat sink supplied doesn't do the best job when under heavy load (in turbo mode) - after 10 minutes it would reach critical thermal point and shut down. On my test set up I have insulated the top of the electronics except the die and clamped an aluminium block with thermal paste, which houses thermal pipes to a large, dense heatsink (approx 250mm x 120mm). This is just because it is what I have to hand, but anyone with access to a mill can make a nice big heat block which will solve this issue. Note not to over tighten the heatsink as the processor is sensitive to stress on the die.
With this set up I have achieved 50deg C at ambient temperature of 23 deg C under full load. 50 deg C is reached at approximately 25 minutes and maintains this temperature for the remainder of the test time (5 hours).
Staff, are you planning any revisions to resolve these issues, or is it left for the end user to supply a solution?
I hope that the rest of you find this helpful!