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Beaglebone Ai Heating Issues

ipv1

While experimenting with the device, I found that the board would shutdown without warning. The reasons is...

 

image

 

Now I tried a number of combos like us the USB tether, connect with display(yes I have the cursed microHDMI cable) and use standalone but every time, it just overheats if I do anything.

 

Idle temps are high too. Was wondering if I got a bad board or is it everyone?

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  • Hi ,

     

    I  looked into this and this is a known issue:

     

    BeagleBoneRegistered AI - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

     

    They recommend adding a larger heat sink and cooling via fan.   

  • in reply to tariq.ahmad

    My investigations showed much the same. My questions are:

     

    1. How was this not caught during testing ? Some minor overheating might be missed but shutting down as described on many of the comments makes it obvious that there is a serious problem.

    2. This is happening when you are only running the OS on the ARM Cortex-A15 cores.  What happens to the temperature when you start using some mixture or all of the ARM Cortex-M4s cores,

          DSPs, EVEs and PRUs too?

    3. If it needs a bigger heat sink and fan just running the OS why doesn't it HAVE a bigger heat sink and fan (see 2.).

     

    After reading the earlier comments in this discussion and checking for other comments on the web I hopped over to Ebay and bought a couple of 25mm fans. The heat sink on the AI is 25mm and

    it looks like there are threaded holes to attach the fan with. I'm not sure how you mount a larger heat sink  other than a adhesive thermal pad or thermal epoxy. There is an adhesive thermal pad

    between the heat sink and SoC but I'm not a big fan of thermal pads and in this case I would much rather have a heat sink that uses mount points on the PCB and a wafer thin layer of quality thermal

    paste.

     

    It also looks like it could use some serious thermal management on the OS side. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and hope that somebody is looking into this.

  • in reply to cstanton

    I was thinking of making one, when board arrives >>>

  • in reply to shabaz

    > without the active cooling, it would throttle more, especially if it detects no cooling is attached

     

    I wish I could get my head around cpufreq a bit more to get a system service package to handle this, I would've perhaps hoped that one existed in debian to manage this for us already but I'm not certain/conviced, I think laptop-utils would/used to do something like this but perhaps not for ARM based controllers?

     

    This seems to be something which other boards manage to do, but I'm not sure of the intricacies of how. If anyone knows I think it'd be pretty useful for this board to work on it at least - or point me in the right direction, dabbling with linux is fun.

  • in reply to cstanton

    I'm convinced that this is a powerful processor with DSP cores similar to pc processor but smaller version (Didn't got hands on board yet). Surely it will heat up and demands similar active cooling like in pc's/laptops. You can try copper pipes and fan to transfer heat, setup will be bulky but you will be able to use Caps.

  • in reply to mudz

    Yes, it is basically a tweaked BeagleBoard X15 chip mounted on a smaller board.

  • in reply to cstanton

    Hi Christopher,

     

    It's something new to me too, I'm not really sure how it is done in Linux with ARM.

    There's this web page that is for BBB discussing cpufreq, and it mentions how some parameters of the policy can be changed by writing to different devices in a cpufreq/ondemand path. But I've never seen a good explanation of how to create a custom policy, because it would be nice to have a couple of defined ones, and swap between them if heatsink/fans are attached or not.

    It's an important topic, because some may prefer no throttling, and just run the device slower, whereas others may prefer to have more dynamic behaviour.

  • in reply to shabaz

    That's right, it's sparked a memory, basically a configuration of the governor needs to be setup in the configuration files, and then the governor profiles can be switched between, I think it then calls the necessary scripts depending on the parameters and automagically handles them? probably requires some time with the man pages.

     

    My fallback tends to be to rely on Arch linux documentation because it's cutting edge / up to date, though apparently there's some kernel documentation so it's probably managed there for the BeagleBone

  • in reply to cstanton

    I believe the issue is that they are trying to get a modern OS to support 6+ year old technology.  These problems have been solved by other vendors thus they do not have the same issue.  The NVIDIA Jetson Nano greatly exceeds the capability of the BB AI and they had the mindset to place a good size heat sink on it and thus far I have not seen a need to add a fan even when running on a JetBot and using vision navigation.  The Google Coral at least comes with heatsink and fan attached since they understood the issues with heat on the chip.  Hack, the processing power in the Nintendo Switch Lite is amazing but is packaged in a nice slim package and no fan.

     

    But, really, if this board is heating up when jut running idle, what the heck is going happen when one uses it for AI or ML as it is advertised for?  You need to either keep a fire extinguisher handy or place the board in a chryo chamber to keep it from burning down the house.

     

    I was looking to showcase this Board at the local Maker Faire coming up, but I think not and wish not to go the route of the BB Blue last year where I shown it running with the EduMIP and folks bought one for themselves from what I had shown and later I see them and find all boards are dead just like mine.  Me thinks this board will experience a similar fate in a short time.

  • in reply to cstanton

    if you can't wait to get a fan-addon for the Beaglebone AI : here is the link to order the pcb right away https://www.element14.com/community/message/282753/l/bb-ai-cooling-addon-board-available#282753

     

     

    this was planned to be released alongside some content, but I see the need for people to use it so please try out this prototype at your own risk.

    the first 0 batch has not yet arrived in my workshop so I can't promise it works perfectly right now

    image

  • in reply to cstanton

    I played a bit last night and put the A15's into deep sleep. After only 1-2 minutes the heat sinks was cool to the touch. I believe the adjusting CPUFREQ or turning off things would manage the heat problems.

  • in reply to jomoenginer

    f you can't wait to get a fan-addon for the Beaglebone AI : here is the link to order the pcb right away https://aisler.net/p/HUQFWYRM

    it takes the recommended Fan and allows to control it with pwm from a Pin on the Beaglebone (compatible with AI, Balck, Green, Blue and Indutrial Beaglebones)
    Here is the BOM:

    1x https://at.farnell.com/multicomp/mcmf0w8ff1002a20/metal-film-resistor-10kohm-125mw/dp/1127017?st=resistor%2010k

    1x https://at.farnell.com/infineon/irlz44npbf/mosfet-n-kanal-55v-41a-to-220/dp/8651418?st=IRLZ44N

    1xhttps://at.farnell.com/nidec-copal/f251r-05llc/axiall-fter-25mm-5v-dc-1-412cfm/dp/2856031?st=fan%205V%2025mm

    + some generic 2,54mm pitch headers you may already have at home.

     

    this was planned to be released alongside some content, but I see the need for people to use it so please try out this prototype at your own risk.

    the first 0 batch has not yet arrived in my workshop so I can't promise it works perfectly right now

    image

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