I have an infrared camera on hand, so I thought I would put it to good use looking at where the heat is coming from.
These are images from a Gen-0 board. The general availability board (Gen-1) has significant improvements in power dissipation, so it will be nice to have a comparison here, it should be quite impressive a difference! So, if you don't have a board on hand, don't freak out - this is not the general availability board.
Without further ado - here it is.
There are two sets of images - the first, with the Parallela with no cooling whatsoever, the maximum temperature reached is around 200F around one of the power supply chips.
- No fan - Gen-0 board
- Parallella Gen-0 - no fan.jpg (39.43 KiB) Viewed 26697 times
- Parallella Gen-0 - no fan
- Parallella Gen-0 - no fan (2).jpg (37.69 KiB) Viewed 26697 times
The entire board acts like a heat sink with the chip casing of the gen-0, so heat is spreading everywhere. To see where the power is coming from, we look at the board with the minimal cooling provided by a desk fan.
- With fan - Gen-0 board
- Parallella Gen-0 - with fan.jpg (32.38 KiB) Viewed 26697 times
With the fan, we can see that the power supply chips are clearly the worst offenders (they peak at 157F even cooled), while the Zync and Epiphany chips stay around a cool 115F, which is what we'd expect once the heat dissipation improvements are rolled out. There is not a lot of heat going into the board already, the issue is that it accumulates.
Just wanted to share the pictures, hope it helps. Rock on!
-Federico
