Properly powering the Tinkerboard

[Aqua]

My current setup is the tinkerboard powered by the raspberry pi universal adapter connected to ethernet and a external HDD(Maxtor M3) powered by the Tinkerboard's usb. I have used it very lightly in this configuration (ssh-ing into it and copying some files to the hdd) but from what I have gathered from the information available here this powering setup is inedequate and will lead to problems.

So I want to follow the recommended method and power it through the GPIO pins. I am considering using this or this powersupply. (I realize 10A on the second one is overkill for the tinkerboard, but the price difference from the 3A rated one is minimal and I could find some other use for it in the future). Is any of this a reasonable choice? TonyMac32 warns not to exceed 5.5v but both list a voltage protection range higher than that.

TonyMac32 also mentions using a zener diode and a capacitor to filter power and protect the board from overvoltage. While I have a basic understanding of electronics, I don't know how to make that circuit or the exact values of the components that I would need. Could someone elaborate on how to make this circuit and the difference it would make over plugging straight to the GPIO pins?

Thank you

 

[TonyMac32]

I use a chassis supply to power most boards that come equipped with micro-USB.  To accomplish that I use a voltmeter to set the supply voltage to 5.25 volts, and apply the power through the GPIO header on the RPi clones, making sure to get both 5V and 2 gnd pins.  

 

With a quality supply there wouldn't be a huge difference between plugging straight into GPIO or adding filtering/over voltage protection.  I would recommend a 0.1 uF ceramic capacitor tied between the 5V and ground to reduce power supply related noise.  The Tinkerboard filters all of the important voltages through a PMIC's various regulators, so it is a bit more resilient than some other boards, however USB and HDMI are not as well protected.  I can provide some more info later, at the day job currently.  

 

[Aqua]

Thank you for the answer.

tWhat's the reasoning behing supplying 5.25V and not a lower value?

Also you mentioned how the HDMI and usb ports are not as well protected as the chip on tinkerboard. Should I be worried that my hdd connected via usb may be damaged?

[guidol]

14 minutes ago, Aqua said:

What's the reasoning behing supplying 5.25V and not a lower value?

The Original RPi power supply has also +5.1V 2.5A output (provides all the power your Pi will need)
https://thepihut.com/products/official-raspberry-pi-universal-power-supply

 

"It seems that the Raspberry Pi requires at least 5.1 volts of power to allow ethernet, keyboard and mice, USB, HDMI, and the SD card to even function correctly, without crashing everything due to low voltage"

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=17492

 

 

[TonyMac32]

5 hours ago, Aqua said:

What's the reasoning behing supplying 5.25V and not a lower value?

 

5.25 V is the spec maximum for USB devices, and the Tinker Board 5V input rail goes straight to the USB.  Also, every interconnect in a circuit is a tiny resistor, and results in a small voltage drop.  The higher the interconnect resistance, the higher the drop.  Even powering through GPIO you are only using 2 pins to carry several amps, which is still not incredibly ideal, even though it is hugely better than using the microUSB.

 

TL;DR:  If you have 5.0 Volts going into the tinker board, you will not have 5.0 volts at the USB connectors, ethernet, etc.  I use 5.25 as it is within specification and allows some immunity against hot plugging current-hungry USB peripherals.

[Aqua]

Your responses have been very helpful.

One other thing: Is damaging my peripherals something I should be worried about if I'm powering straight to the GPIO pins?

[TonyMac32]

Not if you keep the supply at or below 5.25 volts

 

[stefan.steffens]

I'm using a 5V/3A power supply with a barrel connector that I've connected to the GPIO (both 5V pins as well as 3 ground pins via 0.75mm2 cable ). I'm still seeing the Tinkerboard stopping even in low workloads. Is there any way that I could check what's causing the issue?
It's not the SDIO card and I'm only using the Network port.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[TonyMac32]

If you don't have peripherals attached to USB and only the ethernet attached, there should not be an issue.  What did you use to go from the barrel jack to the GPIO pins?  did you attach to 2 +5 and 2 Gnd pins?

[stefan.steffens]

17 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

If you don't have peripherals attached to USB and only the ethernet attached, there should not be an issue.  What did you use to go from the barrel jack to the GPIO pins?  did you attach to 2 +5 and 2 Gnd pins?

Yes, I connected both 5V pins as well as 3 ground pins via 0.75mm2 cable. To not void my warranty I didn't solder directly to the Tinkerboard but to a separate GPIO connector but I guess that shouldn't make  a difference.
 

Maybe it was just some static on the board which caused the instability as the Tinkerboard is now up for more than 30 hours and just repeatedly passed the stress test (stress -c 4 -t 60 ; sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 run --num-threads=4 ; 7z b ; timeout 120 minerd --benchmark).

 

Tinker board crashed again but the behaviour is odd: I always log in via ssh from my PC and I've started to compile on an NFS mounted share and ran a htop in another session to track utilization. First the htop window froze and then the compile one. I could create additional SSH sessions but as soon as I typed commands they froze too.

 

Since this crash I can easily crash it again by restarting the configure script on the NFS share and doing paralle htop or similiar in another session...

 

Any idea what would be wrong here (or if there is a system log file that might point me to some clues)?

 

PS: I'm running Armbian_5.35_Tinkerboard_Debian_stretch_default_4.4.102.img but had the same behaviour with Tinker OS

[chwe]

On 2.1.2018 at 11:07 AM, stefan.steffens said:

Any idea what would be wrong here (or if there is a system log file that might point me to some clues)?

corrupted file system? counterfeit SD-Card? Did you test it with h2testw/f3 before writing armbian with etcher to it? The more it crashes when doing "something useful" the bigger the chance that this messes up.  

[stefan.steffens]

20 hours ago, chwe said:

corrupted file system? counterfeit SD-Card? Did you test it with h2testw/f3 before writing armbian with etcher to it? The more it crashes when doing "something useful" the bigger the chance that this messes up.  

yes, I did test the card (plus used several different ones). I've even ordered a replacement board but same results but now the punch-line: I've switched from Gig-Eth to the wireless and the board is stable. Is there a known issue with the ethernet driver that could be causing the instability

[TonyMac32]

2 hours ago, stefan.steffens said:

yes, I did test the card (plus used several different ones). I've even ordered a replacement board but same results but now the punch-line: I've switched from Gig-Eth to the wireless and the board is stable. Is there a known issue with the ethernet driver that could be causing the instability

 

Not that I am aware of, however I will check up on activity, the 4.4 is a fork of a Rockchip-specific kernel, so something may have come up in the meantime.  What is your use case?  I have only 1 Tinker, and I run Mainline 99% of the time.  If you don't need the touchscreen and VPU, (and at the moment Bluetooth, although that is being addressed) mainline is often a better choice.

[stefan.steffens]

8 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

 

Not that I am aware of, however I will check up on activity, the 4.4 is a fork of a Rockchip-specific kernel, so something may have come up in the meantime.  What is your use case?  I have only 1 Tinker, and I run Mainline 99% of the time.  If you don't need the touchscreen and VPU, (and at the moment Bluetooth, although that is being addressed) mainline is often a better choice.

I've been testing with 4.4, 4.13 and 4.14 and almost same behaviour in all cases. On 4.13 I noticed that the Tinker isn't really crashing but stops responding, via Rpi-Monitor (which maintains connectivity longer than my ssh sessions) I can see the load increasing to > 5.
I picked the Tinker as I was looking for a faster Raspi with more than 1 GB RAM as I want to consolidate my bitcoind and litecoin nodes. I've nfs mounted the blockchain from my NAS but fast eth would be sufficient for that. In addition I'm doing compiling and testing so nothing fancy...

[TonyMac32]

On 1/2/2018 at 5:07 AM, stefan.steffens said:

but had the same behaviour with Tinker OS

Missed that.  Tinker OS has (most of) the most recent Rockchip customizations baked in, so I'm guessing this is still some sort of power issue.  Without being able to reproduce it myself I'm afraid I can't be much help.

[stefan.steffens]

6 minutes ago, TonyMac32 said:

Missed that.  Tinker OS has (most of) the most recent Rockchip customizations baked in, so I'm guessing this is still some sort of power issue.  Without being able to reproduce it myself I'm afraid I can't be much help.

Thanks for your support. I can confirm that my power supply provides 5.17V to the GPIO so I'm assuming this not to be a power issue. I could verify that heavy load using only the WLAN connection was stable but as soon as I added the ethernet connection and did compiles on the NFS share via that something frooze and the CPU got hot.
I'm currently checking against the Mainline Desktop build to see if this should behave differently. Alternatively I could add a USB HDD to increase power consumption. This is really weird :-( 

[stefan.steffens]

I can confirm that the mainline desktop build in combination with fast ethernet is more stable than the other builds but I did manage to crash it as well (after having been stable for almost 2 days). I've used my power meter to check that the currency did not increase significantly as the consumption which is usually in the 1-2 W range only increased to 5-6 W.
Therefore I'm pretty sure that this isn't power supply related (using a 5.17V / 4A supply directly connected to the GPIO) but that there really is an instability related to the ethernet driver which can be more exposed by switching to gig eth and putting more parallel load on the NFS share.

[manuti]

New Tinker Board S http://linuxgizmos.com/asus-tinker-board-s-adds-16gb-emmc-and-more/ with cheat power control to prevent the problem they create:

 

Quote

 

New power management features include low-voltage input detection on the micro-USB port to ensure stability when using a non-qualified power supply. There’s also a new 2-pin power-on header.

 

Product page https://www.asus.com/Single-Board-Computer/Tinker-Board-S/

[chrisf]

11 hours ago, manuti said:

New Tinker Board S http://linuxgizmos.com/asus-tinker-board-s-adds-16gb-emmc-and-more/ with cheat power control to prevent the problem they create:

 

 

Product page https://www.asus.com/Single-Board-Computer/Tinker-Board-S/

I love this:

Quote

** Cable must deliver up to 3A of power output

Micro USB connectors are only rated for 1.8A according to the USB spec.

[manuti]

49 minutes ago, chrisf said:

I love this:

Micro USB connectors are only rated for 1.8A according to the USB spec.

 

yes cheat power control, yeah!

[FranckM]

Hi everyone !

First post here, glad to meet you.

I'm trying to powering up a Tinker Board S using pin 1 and 5 with a step down buck convertor. The main power is coming  from a 12v ac/dc convertor connected to the dc/dc buck convertor set to 5V and 3A. The card just looping trying to boot. Did anyone experience this issue ? Do you have any advice on what step down buck convertor tu use ?

Thanks 

[TonyMac32]

Will it boot when powered via microUSB?

[FranckM]

Hi Tony,

7 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

Will it boot when powered via microUSB?

Yes it will. I think the power I use is not giving enough current.

To correct my previous post, I of course did not use pin 1, but pin 2 or 4 for vcc.

[chwe]

12 hours ago, FranckM said:

Yes it will. I think the power I use is not giving enough current.

hmm... 

22 hours ago, FranckM said:

12v ac/dc convertor connected to the dc/dc buck convertor set to 5V and 3A.

3A should be more than enough... Maybe it doesn't deliver what it promised or.. Voltage is lower than 5V? Did you check it with a multimeter 'under load' (means during the time it 'should' power your SBC)?

[FranckM]

On 9/25/2018 at 8:15 PM, chwe said:

hmm... 

3A should be more than enough... Maybe it doesn't deliver what it promised or.. Voltage is lower than 5V? Did you check it with a multimeter 'under load' (means during the time it 'should' power your SBC)?

Well, I tryed with a AC/DC 5V 3A power, which voltage is correct,  connected on pins 4 (vcc) and 6 (gnd)  and the board does not boot !? It seems Tinker Board S can not be powered from the GPIO anymore ?

Just  made a support request to Asus

[FranckM]

Hi

According to this thread on Tinker Board forum https://tinkerboarding.co.uk/forum/thread-1877-post-7965.html#pid7965 

Hi, maniolias
    Since there is a bug on V2.0.4 u-boot, it will cause un-boot when powering by 40 pin GPIO, it needs the below commit to fix which is included 
    in the v2.0.5 u-boot.
    https://github.com/TinkerBoard/debian_u-boot/commit/879646d1d6c714335eb065a404ae033261236213
    So please use the v2.0.5 u-boot

a fix is needed for the Tinker OS.

Is this fix:

https://github.com/TinkerBoard/debian_u-boot/commit/879646d1d6c714335eb065a404ae033261236213

applied (appliable ?) to Armbian Stretch or Bionic ?

[Igor]

55 minutes ago, FranckM said:

applied (appliable ?) to Armbian Stretch or Bionic ?

It's there for months:
https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/master/patch/u-boot/u-boot-rockchip/board_tinkerboard/0049-added-timeout-when-force-entering-UMS-mode.patch

[FranckM]

Using last Armbian Ubutuntu Bionic build (Armbian_5.59_Tinkerboard_Ubuntu_bionic_next_4.14.67) the Tinker is know booting powered using GPIO pins !

[kyliael]

Any way to get voltage values directly from Armbian without using a DMM ?

[TonyMac32]

The tinker S has the voltage available, the Original Tinker (TM) does not.  armbianmonitor -m on tinker S should show it.