Beaglebone Ai Heating Issues

Hi ipv1 ,

I  looked into this and this is a known issue:

BeagleBone AI - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

shabaz & cstanton I am going to tackle this problem over the weekend. If I get good results, I will publish on Monday. Fingers crossed...

Surely you can change its frequency and governer to low and power saver respectively, but beaware in low power mode it might shut down few peripherals. Also it surely needs active cooling source, read thermal considerations for AM57xx http://www.ti.com/lit/an/sprac53a/sprac53a.pdf 
Better get proper cooling method to test it at full efficiency.
Caution don't let it get too hot, there are chances of EOS damage.  >> http://www.ti.com/lit/an/sprace7/sprace7.pdf

For any upcoming show maybe it could be better to use something more mature.. most of the Pi releases had software teething issues at launch, the software took a while to be in a mature state.

NVIDIA and BB-AI's chips are playing in different markets I think.. the chip in the BB-AI (AM572x) is designed for automotive applications, so will likely have the guaranteed X amount of years availability, and comes in an industrial temp version too, and might use more traditional methods of processing (multiple CPU cores and some general purpose accelerators in H/W, and some accelerators for image recognition features). NVIDIA's chip may not be available in many years time for use in customer designs (this is a guess though) if they keep churning out newer chips and want to sell those instead. NVIDIA has fantastic technology for doing state-of-the-art computing though.

The BeagleBone Black's AM3358 had the longevity advantage too, because that chip was (is) in production or at least offered for sale, for 10 years (might be 15, I can't recall).

The AM3358 was easy-ish to prototype with, to create custom designs (I tried to create my own too, using the OSD3358 which integrates that chip, PMIC, Flash and RAM), but the project went away - lots of time was wasted with Intel's Edison, we had a working prototype, and it went end-of-sale : (

Prototyping a custom board will be much harder with the BB-AI's chip, but there should be modules with that same chip I hope.

I believe development kits are basically to test processor functionality, to learn about new things - How it performs, its features usability, How to code them, most importantly to find mistakes/errors before using it for applications.. But the main thing is, they are made to be used for specific applications. They went good with previous boards similar to other board designer, but this is one mischievous processor. They just need to design the board properly.
This is just board designing gone bad.

I don't know how useful it is, but there's some Sitara Bootcamp, with Power Management training ppt : )

https://training.ti.com/sitara-arm-processors-boot-camp-linux-power-management-overview-and-hands

It's for AX335x, but the concepts mentioned in there are supported in the BB-AI/X15 (AM572x) chip too.

There's some Linux power management training link here:

Sitara Linux Training: Power Management - Texas Instruments Wiki

But it's using TI's Linux image, I don't know if the same drivers are integrated in the normal BB-AI Linux image yet, and if not, what the plan for that is.

The BeagleBoards are a bit more than development kits though.. there's some serious commitment to supporting them with software images and driver code, and supporting customers to create their own variants, or to integrate onto custom PCBs in their own designs, i.e. BeagleBone in appliances effectively, and these would be a large task if the Linux code/drivers/platform stuff needed to be maintained by the company creating their own design.

It's a known processor, it was the same chip on an earlier BeagleBone design, the X15. So they have several years of experience with this chip. It doesn't make sense to assume they had no idea it would get hot.

The BeagleBoards are a bit more than development kits though.. there's some serious commitment to supporting them with software images and driver code, and supporting customers to create their own variants, or to integrate onto custom PCBs in their own designs, i.e. BeagleBone in appliances effectively, and these would be a large task if the Linux code/drivers/platform stuff needed to be maintained by the company creating their own design.

It's a known processor, it was the same chip on an earlier BeagleBone design, the X15. So they have several years of experience with this chip. It doesn't make sense to assume they had no idea it would get hot.

Oh, please. I've been working with the BB for some time now and comparing the support from the NVIDIA site to the now BB Google forums, the NVIDIA support and community far outshines anything the BeagleBoard folks are doing.  If you can get a response from the BeagleBoard you are lucky.

And the fact the BB AI is using the same SoC as the X15 goes back to one of my original issues; its 6+ year old technology.  It was not designed for any of the newer AI and ML aps or workloads of today.

I've had great experiences with the BB team-members for years. They're human, everyone has their off days.

jomoenginer  wrote:

 

It was not designed for any of the newer AI and ML aps or workloads of today.

Ok, so what? There's new orgs being formed all the time, dealing with compute and AI at the edge. That's a growing deployment scenario, and even Cortex-M is being deployed for that role. The raw performance isn't the only criteria.. device longevity, industrial temp spec, hard real-time engines, are all things that the TI chips are good at.

It sounds like you expected BB-AI to be something different from what it is.

Nope. I just expect the board to perform as advertised.  The "AI" in the name seems to imply it is designed for AI, meaning Artificial Intelligence.  Or, are you saying it stands for something else?  Chip longevity is only valid for currently produced products and for a specific support lifestyle, or in cases where a mature device is mandatory by spec;  not typically for new products in this particular space. 

jomoenginer  wrote:

 

...I just expect the board to perform as advertised.  The "AI" in the name seems to imply it is designed for AI, meaning Artificial Intelligence.  Or, are you saying it stands for something else?

I think the board will work for AI applications..

It's predecessor was the BB-X15, powered by some high-powered rocket : )

Back at school, we were taught there used to be some cheerios commercial about feeling groovy, and one person sued the manufacturer because they didn't make him feel groovy in the mornings. The product is different but the concept feels the same : )

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jomoenginer , I understand the frustration, especially when we want hardware to work and just work, and work as advertised.

I think that with the BeagleBone range of hardware it's pushing for something different than with the repeatedly compared nVidia board and that it is open source. Unfortunately regardless of people's opinion and view of open source, that introduces the challenge of it being supported and it relies on the generosity of people with their time and effort to support it well.

This isn't too different from some other boards that are released that rely on the generosity of the Community to support them, and if someone doesn't want to support it, dare I say it, they're free to walk away, and I agree there's some element of expectancy to pay for a product and have it working to a level - and I would suggest that there are products out there which meet that criteria.

BeagleBone gives you the opportunity to get into the hardware on a level that proprietary hardware doesn't, and I would personally suggest that's partly what you're paying for, and it means you have to work a bit more at it, though you can then turn around and say "I did this, this is my cred" and share it, and be appreciated for it. To me that's part of the community and part of open source, you may not agree however it is what I've seen as the ethos behind most open source hardware and software products and it's a challenge to the ecosystem regardless.

This's why we're looking at trying to solve the problem rather than focus on the flaw of the problem and pin someone to it for being responsible, we know what the problem is, we can find a solution and then hopefully the next problem is more a case of "do I put an if statement here?". If we hit a hard wall then we can go back and say it needs changing.

Does that make sense? Help if you can, you don't have to, and we hear you on the issues.

Sounds like a plan.  Thanks!