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  • Author Author: clickio
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UPDATE: under 40 degrees C!!! Lowest idle cpu temp so far on the BeagleBone AI SBC! how-to and pictures inside

clickio

OK, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that this board gets H-O-T. It's not something to be held in the palm of your hand, so it's not that critical. Until it is. Because, as all/most CPUs, it halts when reaching a certain temperature in order to prevent a complete meltdown. In its case, its probably around 85-100 degrees Celsius.(I'll update the exact figure if I find it in the documentation)

 

So one of the key things for maximizing the use of this SBC is cooling it properly. There is currently a fan cooler solution (this one was kindly provided to me by element14 for the dedicated RoadTest), a dedicated cooling cape (a plug-in board just like HATs for Raspberry PI) and I think that we will see even more solutions in the future, possibly a dual-fan solution to heat both sides of the board, as in my testing a very primitive simulation of this reached the lowest cpu temp.

 

I say 'primitive' because the only thing I did was placing the board on a laptop cooler with large cooling fans, as shown in the picture.

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And here is the result!

 

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As a recap, my test results for idle cpu temps were:

 

1. 61,8 - 64,2 degrees Celsius with just the supplied heatsink, passive cooling

2. 50,6 - 53,4 degrees Celsius  with the 5V F251R-05LLC brushless fan cooler attached

3.  48,6 - 50,6 degrees Celsius  with both the 5V F251R-05LLC brushless fan cooler attached and the board placed on the laptop cooler.

 

So cooling from both sides improves the cpu temperature with 2-5 degrees Celsius, by just using this simulation, I bet that by using a second heatsink + dedicated fan can make a lot more difference.

 

LATER EDIT: It even got as low as 47,8 with my dual-active cooling setup!!!

image

 

IMPORTANT UPDATES: going under 40 degrees!!!

 

Enclosure update: Thanks to who had a few spares (see his article here: BeagleBone AI (BB-AI) - Getting Started )and was very kind to send them over, my BBAI now is housed in a white-plastic enclosure, which I'll try to use as a base for a dual-active cooling solution. Yes, I still haven't found shorter screws yet!:)

 

imageimageimage

 

Cooling update:

 

I've finally achieved maximum cooling with this board, let me tell you how I did it. Now I really feel  I can try the machine-learning features without any worry of overheating and/or unexpected halts because of that.

 

Based on 's enclosure, I added another tall floor under the board, where I fitted a 12V cooler powered independently from the board. I also added passive cooling to all the black chips on the top side (RAM memory, eMMC memory and the TPS659037 power management chip) and to the one on the underside (second RAM memory chip) with the help of some microporous heatsinks and now the board stays below 40 degrees in regular usage.

 

Here are the pix!

image image

And the test results:

 

WITH underside cooling:

image

 

WITHOUT underside cooling (I took the cooler off the 'contraption'):

 

image

  • in reply to clickio

    (by the way, you may have some permissions set to 'do not contact' or something maybe. I can see you've sent me a Follow request, but when I try to Follow and then to message, I see the image below. There should be a 'message' button but it is absent.

    You may need to accept my Follow request too, and check in your profile that people following you can contact you.

    image

  • in reply to clickio

    Hi Ionut,

     

    The heatsink is a sheet of 58x40x1mm copper with six 20x20mm heatsinks tiled across it. There is a better heatsink tile than the one I used, the link to it is here:

    BeagleBone AI (BB-AI) - Getting Started

    Regarding the plates, I cut them myself, but I do have a spare set that I do not need, so if you want it just send me a private message. The spare set is the same design except that the top plate is white and is made of the same plastic as the bottom plate. I didn't have enough of the black plastic basically!

  • in reply to shabaz

    wow, great-looking setup! do you have a link for that larger heatskink? and the top/bottom plates?

  • in reply to colporteur

    It is configurable to disable unused accelerators/cores but you're right, in its default normal config, it does need a fan, or a bigger heatsink (a small one is supplied) or both.

    Having said that, if they had supplied it with a small fan, that would have allowed people to move on more quickly to using the board with the config and software image as it stands today, the next question being what fan to supply, since the typical cheap 20x20mm fans are quite noisy.

     

    There's soon-to-be a plug-on fan cape (there's no release date yet), it's an extra cost. Photo below, left side shows the fan cape. It looks like a larger 40mm fan.

    (image source - beagleboard mailer)image

     

    For my BB-AI, I went with a 40mm fan too, but didn't want the USB connection either, so I directly soldered it, the red and black wire are visible (the other orange, yellow and black wires are unrelated, they are going off to a USB UART board in this pic). The temperature is mid-40 deg C so the fan plus the larger heatsink (visible as white heatsink in the sandwich) is clearly working, but unfortunately there's no temperature sensor to control the fan nor speed control with this method, so the sound is louder than it should be. I think the fan could be switched off for a while with large heatsink methods.

    Still, I'm reasonably ok with this fixed-speed fan method for now, and if the sound gets too irritating I can always move the BB-AI to another room I suppose (I usually use such boards via SSH, not direct-attached KB/mouse).

     

    Incidentally since the Pi benefits from huge volume of sales there are third party enclosures for it which are fully metal to  cool passively with no fan (but they may not be good for WiFi), but I doubt there are any such enclosures for the BB-AI.

    image

  • in reply to shabaz

    Maybe I am just being picky but it seems deceptive. The fan requirement is understood but providing it is the responsibility of the buyer. Using the USB fan as suggested in the post by seems a poor fix.

     

    I feel the fan and a designed connection point, not an accommodated connection point, should have been included in the design. Unless future code is going to significantly reduce temperature.

     

    I could accept the premise that this a a board for development and you are left to discover what is needed. Even that is making excuses for a limited design.