Hi,
This post will address potential overheating issues that you might encounter with your Parallella board and how to overcome them.
First if all, some power measurement data points, all measured at the 5V input to the board:
-Power with Epiphany clock gating turned in 0.92. This is currently not enabled on the SDK but an example can be found on the epiphany-examples directory.
-Power without aggressive epiphany clock gating is 0.97.
-Power with USB devices plugged in..depends in what you have plugged in, could easily be 1.3 A.
-Employ some other cooling technique, like mounting the board to a metal plate.
Best practices for ensuring stable operations and a long operating life:
-Use any type of fan, a gentle breeze should do.
-Install the heatsink on the zynq
-Install a second heatsink on epiphany
-Put the board on its side to improve natural convection.
-Use a powered USB hub (in a safe way)
Some of these power issues are due to the early version of the zynq being used. Going forward, the new production version of the zynq will have less standby power and the situation will be better yet for the zynq 7010.
We will also keep working on tuning the FPGA load and the rest of the firmware to further reduce the default power.
Andreas