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SBC's in pictures

Former Member

One thing that tends to annoy me is that when there's a photo of a SBC it tends to be on a plain background with nothing that you can use to judge the relative size of the board. Or what's worse is something like the SBC home page here on e14 where there's a list of six SBC's at the right where the pictures all seem to have been re-scaled to make them all look mostly the same size.

 

I'd seen photos of the Wandboard previously, but when two were delivered today I was surprised how small the package was... then you start wondering if they've only sent one..

 

So here's an attempt to rectify the situation.

image

Top middle: Sabre-Lite

Top Right  : BeagleBone Black

 

Bottom Left: Minnowboard

Bottom Middle : Wandboard Quad

Bottom Right : Raspberry Pi

  • That's a very good point you make about the content editors scaling everything to fit the size of columns and as a result all sense of actual size being lost.  I knew that the Minnowboard was comparatively large (nearly nano-ITX size), but didn't know how the SL and WB compared to the credit-card size BBB and Pi.  (Parallella is like the last two.)

     

    Perhaps Element14 needs a simple, long horizontal image displaying all their boards side-by-side purely for purposes of size comparison.  If the plain background is a graticule labelled in mm and the boards all rest on the horizontal origin, that could actually be a useful resource.  At least the sense of scale would be preserved.

     

    Morgaine.

     

     

    PS. Very impressive heatsink on the WB.  How hot does it get?

  • in reply to morgaine

    I'd asked that when he got one and his reply was slightly warm, or words to that effect.  So far that seems to be how it is, it gets just warm enough to know that it's warm, but so far nothing more. The SL with the same SoC just has the metal cap, the WB doesn't have the cap, instead having a thermal pad between the die and the heatsink. I suspect the heatsink is overspecced somewhat, but if it's in a tight enclosure then maybe not..

  • in reply to Former Member

    selsinork wrote:

     

    I suspect the heatsink is overspecced somewhat, but if it's in a tight enclosure then maybe not..

     

    I prefer the term "conservatively spec'd" when it comes to heat dissipation.  High temperatures are just plain bad for electronics even when the devices affected can stand a lot more.  Boards don't like it, joints like it even less, and conducted, radiated and convected heat has built-in intelligence to seek out the least tolerant component.  (I consulted with Loki for insider knowledge on that one.)

     

    Wandboard's nice heatsink makes me want to get the board even more.

     

    Morgaine.

  • in reply to morgaine

    Morgaine Dinova wrote:

     

    Perhaps Element14 needs a simple, long horizontal image displaying all their boards side-by-side purely for purposes of size comparison.  If the plain background is a graticule labelled in mm and the boards all rest on the horizontal origin, that could actually be a useful resource.  At least the sense of scale would be preserved.

    At least they should say how big it is compared to an Altoids box image  For example, BBone fits because it has rounded corners, but RasPi doesn't.

  • in reply to morgaine

    I've the wandboard in its enclosure running 24/7 stationed in one corner of my desk next to my MikroTik routerboard. It is not doing anything very compute intensive or running a lot of graphic stuff, just some very simple network monitoring tools. I'm planning to install some stuff like nagios, etc, to make the board sort of a watchdog of other stuff I've in my office.

     

    If I point the IR gun to it it shows 85-86F. Yes the heatsink looks big compared with the SoC size, but that is good since it provides a lot of area for thermal dissipation and also may the board more robust mechanically.

     

    Obviously I couldn't resist the temptation to taking the heatsink out when the board arrived so here is a picture of the board without it.

    image

     

    I'm really impressed about the density and how they did the pcb layout.

     

    Regards

    Jorge

  • in reply to jamodio

    Funny, after checking they booted up, the next thing I did was to take the heatsink off for a look image

  • in reply to morgaine

    Morgaine Dinova wrote:

    Wandboard's nice heatsink makes me want to get the board even more.

    As I understand it, only the Quad has the heatsink.