Looking for a board with battery charger and SATA capabilities

[splite]

Hello,

 

I'm going to industrialize a project using currently the Olimex Lime2. This board is great and have exactly what I need, among others, battery charger and SATA capability.

However I figured out that I can not use this board as there is no CE compliance and thus can not be sold as a product.

 

I'm looking for the fellowing specifications :

• Run on battery for around 5-6 hours, so the board needs a battery charger
• Good computation >= 1Gz at least 2 cores
• Large RAM >= 2GB
• SATA connectivity: We need to load large amount of data, between 250Go and 1To, so a SSD driver connected to a SATA port is required
• Good wifi card and linux driver: The wifi hotspot created should at least handle 15 users connected simultaneously
• An Ethernet port to transfer the data

 

If you have heard of any board having this feature, please share it

 

So far is what I have found :

• CompuLab SBC-iAM but the technology is quite old

 

Best

Florian

[Igor]

Some of my thoughts: 

 

>Good computation >= 1Gz at least 2 cores

no problem

 

>Large RAM >= 2GB
no problem

>SATA connectivity: We need to load large amount of data, between 250Go and 1To, so a SSD driver connected to a SATA port is required
Only Marvell / Intel boards.

>Run on battery for around 5-6 hours, so the board needs a battery charger

Only with external UPS or with custom board design + large size battery. Intel and Marvell boards, especially old one, sucks much more power than Olimex Lime2 or similar and they would need serious battery packs for 5-6 hours, while Lime can achieve this on tablet size battery.

 

>Good wifi card and linux driver: The wifi hotspot created should at least handle 15 users connected simultaneously

Probably only Atheros 9380 / ath9. Opensource driver. There is newer generation (AC) ath10, but you must rely and trust closed source driver ... cards are much expensive and used to had problems. Router class cards are mPCI or private format only.

 

>An Ethernet port to transfer the data

gigabit? no problem

[hojnikb]

Out of the cheap boards, this might be worth considering 

https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Orange-Pi-Win-Plus-Development-Board-A64-Quad-core-Support-linux-and-android-Beyond-Raspberry-Pi/1553371_32803012893.html

+ USB->SATA bridge.

 

this will be fairly power efficient, has battery power support (just solder li-ion cells to the appropriate pads) but sata performance will be slow due to usb2 bus limitation.

 

Another option is something like ASRock J3355B-ITX (or any other goldmont based board). You get great sata/network performance, but you will have to figure out battery power (a cheap UPS would do the trick in this case). Also it's going to be less efficient as orange pi board.

 

Another out of the box approach would be to take out a laptop motherboard based on atom/pentium chipset. You get everything (battery, sata, ethernet, good efficiency).

Edited April 5, 2017 by Igor
Merged two posts.

[splite]

Thanks for those advices.

 

Marvell and Intel boards from ESPRESSObin, SolidRun or InHand sounds great, but unfortunately none of them provide an UPS. We can not afford to design a proper one around a SOM module or a carry board that would ingrate such component.

@Igor do you know good UPS such as https://www.adafruit.com/products/2465 but with better battery and power management such as the one we can find on Olimex ? Furthermore I'm not sure that AdaFruit products are CE compliant. 

 

I never heard of the Atheros 9380. It is seems to be available only as PCIe

 

@hojnikb did you try the Orange Pi Win plus ? it looks interesting. I don't know if all the components are compatible with linux legacy or mainline kernel. I have not seen any Armbian release for this board so far. As you said, using a bridge USB -> SATA can be an issue for data transfers.

 

ITX board are by fare too power hungry

 

[hojnikb]

3 hours ago, splite said:

Thanks for those advices.

 

Marvell and Intel boards from ESPRESSObin, SolidRun or InHand sounds great, but unfortunately none of them provide an UPS. We can not afford to design a proper one around a SOM module or a carry board that would ingrate such component.

@Igor do you know good UPS such as https://www.adafruit.com/products/2465 but with better battery and power management such as the one we can find on Olimex ? Furthermore I'm not sure that AdaFruit products are CE compliant. 

 

I never heard of the Atheros 9380. It is seems to be available only as PCIe

 

@hojnikb did you try the Orange Pi Win plus ? it looks interesting. I don't know if all the components are compatible with linux legacy or mainline kernel. I have not seen any Armbian release for this board so far. As you said, using a bridge USB -> SATA can be an issue for data transfers.

 

ITX board are by fare too power hungry

 

 

You'd be surprised how power efficient recent intel chips can be. I have not tried this board, but you can look up pine64, which uses the same chipset to get an idea.

[Igor]

I am afraid your requirements doesn't come close to any known board from serial production. I can't come up with nothing without making compromises which are directly related to your use case.

 

5 hours ago, splite said:

do you know good UPS such as https://www.adafruit.com/products/2465 but with better battery and power management such as the one we can find on Olimex ? Furthermore I'm not sure that AdaFruit products are CE compliant. 

 

Unfortunately not.

 

5 hours ago, splite said:

I never heard of the Atheros 9380. It is seems to be available only as PCIe

 

The best things are always hard to find  Those or similar were present in last non AC generation of high end notebooks, including Macbook under code name "AirPort Extreme" and in many middle class wireless routers. Now you can get them (used) as low as 10 USD on eBay. You "only" need to hack the driver which unlocks AP mode on 5Ghz. This transfer them to router class device ... which is already done on our kernels. 

+ opensource driver

+ 3x3 MIMO

+ dual band AP mode (with hack)

+ stable

+ less than 10 USD

- mPCI only

- full size

 

Quote

did you try the Orange Pi Win plus ?

It's a new device with a chip which is not yet very well supported and it does not meet your criteria anyway. BTW: I recall another issue with Marvell boards - CPU frequency scaling is not yet implemented so you end up with full speed all the time.

[zador.blood.stained]

3 minutes ago, Igor said:

+ dual band AP mode (with hack)

Dual band but not dual radio/dual concurrent, so either 2.4GHz or 5GHz but not both at the same time (unless I missed something)

[Igor]

Single radio band at once. By default AP mode works only at 2.4 with hack also on 5ghz. Thats all.

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