Parallella drawing a lot of current

Hardware related problems and workarounds

Parallella drawing a lot of current

Postby rmsc » Fri Jun 20, 2014 9:06 am

Hello,

I've been having trouble with all the power supplies I had at home, always getting very low voltages when powering the parallella. So I went for an ATX PSU, and finally managed to power up the board. It's an old (low power) PSU, so I still can only get about 4.8V out of it, which seems to be enough to boot the board (got to the X login screen). Only the NIC leds turn on though (power not good).

Now the funny thing: the board is drawing 3.8 A in HDMI mode, and only slightly less in headless mode. This seems to be a lot! Without the SD card (not booting) it draws about 3.3 A. So there must be something leaking somewhere.

Any hint on how this happens? I'll try to debug the thing as I get time.
rmsc
 
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Re: Parallella drawing a lot of current

Postby gceline » Fri Jun 20, 2014 1:21 pm

The board should draw 1-1.4A so there is something desperately wrong!
Check all your connections, validate no shorts, have you added anything (legs, cases, anything...) that could cause a short?
if not then there may be a fundamental board problem, contact support@adapteva.com
Graham
Adapteva
gceline
 
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Location: Lexington, MA

Re: Parallella drawing a lot of current

Postby rmsc » Sat Jul 05, 2014 2:22 pm

Hi Graham,

I have two boards, and I've soldered the jumper to power them from the posts (I want to make a mini-stack). I've tested them individually though, and added temporary nylon posts while I try to sort this out.

There is no obvious short, at least not before the first power converter. Both boards look the same from the standpoint of an ohm-meter connected to the power terminals.Things only change when they are powered up, and my other board is within spec.

I'll contact adapteva support then, thank you!
rmsc
 
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