Clusterboard Feature request topic

[PeterKeuning]

I couldn't find one anywhere else on this forum; maybe it's a good idea to have a feature request topic since I believe it is a prototype and thus still in development?

Things I'd love to see changed:

- A second ethernet switch, to serve as an ethernet backbone between the SOPine modules, for inter-module traffic (cluster/config sync/HA traffic, front/backend separation, etc).
- A physical connection to that backbone switch so you could connect multiple clusterboards and have modules from different boards directly interact without using up bandwidth on the main switch
- A different placement of the pin headers for the modules, these aren't accessible when a heatsink is applied.
- A step-up converter to 12V and Pin header for a cooling fan (so you can simply use one powersupply and don't need a seperate one for the fan).
- Some form of individual remote control; remote power/reset functions, serial over ethernet type functionality


If this kind of feedback is unwanted, go ahead and close the topic

[PigLover]

I couldn't find one anywhere else on this forum; maybe it's a good idea to have a feature request topic since I believe it is a prototype and thus still in development?

Things I'd love to see changed:

...
- A step-up converter to 12V and Pin header for a cooling fan (so you can simply use one powersupply and don't need a seperate one for the fan).
...

If this kind of feedback is unwanted, go ahead and close the topic

There are a good number of 5v fans on the market - including good quality quiet ones from Notua...

[benallen]

I'd like the functionality to create a BMC or management node for the cluster board. The primary features being:

- Each node's console UART connected to something like a pair of FDTI FT4232H USB-4xUART, or exposed via compatible headers for: http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/Modules...2H-56_Mini
- The reset pin for each node connected to a relay or similar, ideally with a controller exposed via an external facing USB device.
- Not sure if its possible with the SOPIN's pinout, but ability to out-of-band flash the SPI on a node.

USB is nice for each of these as for development you can loop it back to the first node on the clusterboard. Then for scaling up, say with 6 clusterboards, you could connected each into a hub, and have a single Pine64-LTS have access too all the UARTs and have remote power cycling ability.

Looking further out, upgrading the embedded switch with a 10GBase-T uplink and some amount of management functionality would be useful. The management functionality would allow SDN like work.

[n0ctilucient]

Dual Ethernet sounds good.  Then a clusterboard can be clustered.

[dcdc]

+1 some sort of management controller and more network throughput in/out of the clusterboard. I'd also welcome more local storage options, not that there'e much real estate left for an eMMC per module...