Beaglebone Ai Heating Issues

At this moment, my BB Ai no longer works. I removed the pull-up resistor which Jan Cumps mentioned as a solder bridge, but the board booted the same way to heat up the same way as before. Then I ran a sudo apt dis-upgrade and after rebooting, the board never booted up again.

I added the pull-up again but no go.

I also tried booting from an image but no go.

So

a. Don't remove the solder-bridge

b. Don't run updates.

I will try and use the serial interface to see if uboot is doing something or if the board itself is dead. I am hoping for the former but it may be the latter due to overheating.

Kind of an expensive board to be putting a soldering iron to it which I would suspect violates the warranty.

Does your board have a heat sink and or fan on the main processor?

The board has a full heat sink on the SoC. But is hard to tell if any thermal paste. Mine gets hot with very little usage. But the heating issue is not as bad as ipv1 .

Is it possible to remove, add new solder paste and replace the heatsink?

A little bit of heat works. A hairdryer or hot air blower on low temperature ...

I'm still going back-and-forth on what to do, but am currently thinking of leaving the heatsink attached (too scared to try to remove it : ) and then glue a larger aluminium plate (maybe just 1mm thick?) to it, using double-sided thermal tape.

Then, there are quite low-profile heatsinks that are 20x20x2.5mm, so I could try gluing (say) four of those to the top of the aluminium plate, i.e. for 40x40mm total area or slightly more. Then, have a 40mm fan on the acrylic cover blowing down on those heatsinks. That way the larger fan is blowing over more surface area.. I'm not too good with thermodynamics so this is just experimental!

I too thought that might be the safer option. I was looking at mine last night and I am going to make a heatsink that fits into the existing slots - I reckon five 60mm x 30mm high x 1~2mm thick aluminium plates. I'd use some thermal paste and bend the fins slightly to get a good friction fit. Then as 'belt and braces' I'd add a fan.

I'll post any progress.

I too thought that might be the safer option. I was looking at mine last night and I am going to make a heatsink that fits into the existing slots - I reckon five 60mm x 30mm high x 1~2mm thick aluminium plates. I'd use some thermal paste and bend the fins slightly to get a good friction fit. Then as 'belt and braces' I'd add a fan.

I'll post any progress.

Hi shabaz - I've made a first prototype which seems to fit quite well. Packing out the top spacing by one extra washer was enough to get it to grip the existing heatsink fins. I'll make a bracket over the top for my DC fan and add some thermal grease on the final assembly.

I think I've just fed my Beagleboard a new bone so I'm going to call it the "Beagleboard's Bone" and might even shape those aluminium fins accordingly

I'll spin that U.Fl antenna around as well.

Wow! 14rhb that is industrial strength. I would call it a "heavy duty, harder than a Bone" Do you know what it weighs with that on it?

Thank you

It's only aluminium and probably won't register on the kitchen scales but I'll have a go at weighing it.

The downside will be not being able to use capes on this board.

Hi Rod,

That should do it : ) Very cool look! Also, it looks like the end may be about 20mm square, so in theory you could even mount a fan sideways, to leave the slots visible and not covered by a fan.

Thank you. That is a very good idea - blowing the air through (towards the ethernet) will have a clearer flow than downwards. The end measures 15mm so it is still possible. I could also add two more fins on the outside of the stack.

Currently I measure 84g all up. The BB-AI weight is specified as 48g: https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-ai/wiki/System-Reference-Manual

My heatsink alone has added 36g and I still need the fan and brackets.

This seems at bit overkill and impractical.  So, you are expecting to get good heat transfer from the heat sink to the fins you added? 

Hi jomoenginer , it was low-cost as I had the metal in my scrap bin. I'm currently not looking on expanding with capes nor sending this into the sky so the weight and bulk isn't an issue to me currently. With thermal paste in each groove I expect a better heat transfer than the existing surfaces to air (which is one of the worst conductors of heat energy). Once heat is pulled into my new fins they have a much larger surface area and, as shabaz suggested, the fan can go on the end.

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://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 too would prefer to put the fan sideways on my BB-AI too, but really wanted to go with a larger fan (to reduce noise) so am stuck with mounting mine on top : ( So it's likely it will reach the same height as yours, once I've added the flat alu plate and heatsinks on top too.