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failure rate of SBC boards


constantius

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I would like to discuss the subject of failure and SBC systems of various brands. I just broke the Nanopi T2 module. I also had a damaged module of orangepi 2 and orange pi RK 3399. You have a lot of boards. Did you happen to be under the influence of overvoltages in the high temperature or period the use of the board broke down ?. Which producer is the worst in this respect?

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+50 SBC. 2 'failures' I can remember so far:

  • Spring loaded SD card slot on a Raspberry Pi 2 broken (then using a bar clamp to hold the SD card into place)
  • Somewhat strange behaviour on one Orange Pi One I tried to fry since 'powering through GPIO header' without noticing that the thing is 180° rotated. @zador.blood.stained is the OPi One still living I sent to you 2 years ago?

 

 

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2 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

Tinker Board ones coming off entirely, but with a few hundred cycles on mine I think they must have been being too rough.

I put them in and out ~10-20x each time I flashed a new image during the ISP1 driver nightmare (only cause I was bored during flash of the new image)... So my tinker should have at least 400 insertions of SD-Cards - probably my cards don't look that healthy anymore.. :D 

samsung.jpg.fa517825a4846e6572854ab694cf8d83.jpg   

the mechanism still work like a charm.. 

 

@constantius having that many damaged boards looks more like an usage error than a board specific issue. I've an OPI Zero near to my hotplate in the kitchen, it gets steamed it's full of small oil droplets due to lack of a proper casing and it still works over 2-3 months (don't ask, it's a stupid IoT project related to yogurt:lol:). 

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15 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

I haven't had a board fail yet. 


My 5 cents. Not a single board ever broke and no DOA. Actually, I broke Helios4 the very first day of testing - SOM died and partially broke SD card slot on Orange PC2 if this is related to this topic at all. It still works, but you need to be creative when inserting SD.

I also broke a dozen SD cards. They just stop working. No name and expensive ones.

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Well, I repaired by soldering 2 RPI and destroyed by soldering a nanopi air.

 

And that is just remarkable seing the number of times I found my boards crashed and boiling hot, generally because of network failure. (wifi, bt ... :angry:)

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6 hours ago, arox said:

And that is just remarkable seing the number of times I found my boards crashed and boiling hot

 

Found my XU4 sitting there at "should it be glowing" temperature (I did something wrong with Arch at the time), doesn't seem to have taken any damage.  Tinkers like to go into full "Three Mile Island" mode if they crash as well, a good thing to watch out for.

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I got 2 banana pis running 24/7 for 4 years with SSD -> not any problem. I've got a spare one that I boot every year.

I got 2 Pine64 used at work also running 24/7 for 1,5 year -> not any problem with the boards but I had to renew the SD on both Pine64.

I also have Pine64 and various Nanopi that are not running 24/7 but still work fine.

 

My 3 Rpis (only old ones : first 256Mb RpiB, another 512Mb and a RPI2) are also fine (used with Libreelec in various room at home) -> the SDcard never had a fail.

 

So for SBC not a single fail.

 

If I add others microcontrollers, never had a problem with my arduinos (mainly moteinos) but some Flash fails with ESP8266.

 

 

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I have no less than 50 SBCs from different vendors, including OrangePi, BananaPi, RaspberryPi, and NanoPi. All of my failures came from NanoPi, so much for providing boards with industrial quality. These were all DOA's:

 

- one NanoPi Neo microSD slot failed to latch, new board, shipping not refunded

- two of the mini shields for Neo Core/Core2 failed to do anything - I bought four of these kits, the failures were never refunded

- four UNO dock V2 - I bought 4 of these, all of them not working, never refunded

 

I do like the NanoPi boards when they work, but their quality control is terrible. 

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On 6/25/2018 at 8:56 PM, guidol said:

I hadnt any defective board when they are new....
I did buy 6 OPi One used - and only was DOA - but I did get them cheap anyway :)

 

Today I did take a look at my "dead" OPi One - no sign of life via MicroUSB - but powering

via GPIO and Power barrel the ethernet-LEDs light up and I do get the following error-message via the TTL-serial-port:

U-Boot SPL 2017.11-armbian (Jan 25 2018 - 07:54:28)
DRAM: 0 MiB
### ERROR ### Please RESET the board ###

U-Boot SPL 2017.11-armbian (Apr 20 2018 - 12:19:20)
DRAM: 0 MiB
### ERROR ### Please RESET the board ###

It seems that the DRAM-Chips are dead? But how can the u-boot boot without DRAM?
Is it a small controller with its own ram?

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13 hours ago, guidol said:

Is it a small controller with its own ram?

I know a lot of chips load the SPL into a small amount of on-SoC RAM, that could be it

 

Maybe you could attempt to reflow the board and see if you cracked a joint

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I damaged two of the tiny capacitors that are right next to the heatsink attachment hole in a XU4 with the pliers, trying to remove the heatsink (shame on me :unsure:), and the USB3 ports stopped working, but the rest of the board still works perfectly. No other damage or hardware failure to any board, in spite of all the hard times I have given them.

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remember the old athlon CPUs?

 

220px-Athlon_XPM_2400l.jpg

 

that was always a 'Pray that he will not break'-moment when you mount a new cooler for a friend... :lol: Especially when he spend all his money for the super cool new CPU to show that it is better than intel.. :P 

 

9 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

if you're reasonably careful, a heat gun

As long as it wasn't bga.. heat gun-reflow worked well for me..  But for sure, others perform better here::lol:

 

31 minutes ago, JMCC said:

I damaged two of the tiny capacitors that are right next to the heatsink attachment hole in a XU4 with the pliers

as long as you don't have a short after... it mostly doesn't 'matter'.. For sure.. hardkernel put caps there for a reason but it might work ok-ish without. 

 

33 minutes ago, JMCC said:

and the USB3 ports stopped working,

do you know why? Related to the caps? Did you try to fix it?

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