Rock64 power consumption

[pfeerick]

The reason for NOT recommending only 2A on either board is that spikes (particularly at bootup) and peripherals require more;  dongles of all types, gpio(s), active cooling, etc.

Have you measured what the spikes are with the rock64? I have to admit I haven't yet... the PSU I used last time for testing the pine64 had an unfortunate incident with itself and the programmable part of the programmable power supply is fried   

The pine64 had some very nasty power on spikes which IIRC went up to maybe as hight as 2.1A... but I suspect the rock64 isn't quite as spiky as the pine64.  

if that is the case hook up the rock64 to 2Av supply and work with that. since 2A barely is enough to power the pine64 by itself even using the pins as a route, it stands to reason that in order to avoid boot issues on the rock64 they made the decision to go to 3A. it is nice to know that the micro usb is gone. but in moving to barrel they made the decision to use a cheap 3.5x1.35 barrel instead of the more frequently used 5.5x2.1. so yeah now that you two are on record that 2A is plenty, i expect to see nothing but 2A recommendations for power from here on out from you two.

Just for giggles, I just plugged it into a 1A USB powerbank and it booted up fine (twice in a row)... and the highest I current I saw drawn during boot was 590ma (0.59A). I won't run the cpuburn this time since I don't need to push the powerbank right to the edge... It was nice to see Panasonic did the right thing with this one though... it's outputting 5.1v instead of 5.0v So based on that, I would have no qualms with a proper 5.1v /1.5A PSU for the rock64 on it's ownsome, or work a wireless mouse or flash drive perhaps. If you have any other peripherals (USB powered external HDDs, high power wifi, etc) then we're looking at 2-2.5A minimum again. And I believe Pine primarily opted to not use the 5.5x2.1 barrel because it is more often used for 12v power than 5v, so there's no need to make it easy for someone to plug in a 12v PSU (or just the wrong one) and blow up their pinebook / rock64 / sopine + any other peripherals they happen to have connected. Because people will do that, and then complain that the connector should have been different. So they're damned whichever way they go... they just opted for the smaller connector which is also readily available.