power supply

[ViperVi]

Power consumption is hard to predict. It's hardly depend on your application and if you attach external devices. e.g. USB devices.
I have found a compact 5V 4A PSU at Aliexpress for less than 5$ (including shipment)
I will not recommend to use the micro USB connector for permanent power connection. It should be possible to connect power to the EULA pin connector as well and then use a wire dimension suitable to the power load. (But be careful, use the correct pins and respect the polarity, else can the board be damaged)

gbjensen, please share the link of the PSU that you found on Aliexpress for the benefit of larger audience here...

---

1500ma = 1.5A, which is not sufficient to power the Pine.

1.5A are more than enough for normal workloads. But as you already pointed out using 'intelligent chargers' that provide 500mA max to 'dumb' devices and more only if the device in question speaks any of the USB power delivery languages (which the Pine does not on its DC-IN connector) might be part of the problem.

The other problem are USB cables that show resistance way too high (which the Pine's AXP803 PMIC is able to tolerate somewhat but will lead to crashes/deadlocks when sudden load peaks happen).

A big 'thank you' to the Raspberry Pi foundation that invented one of the most moronic ideas ever 4 years ago (unfortunately picked up by many other board makers later): To be able to power a device reliably through Micro USB. The problems are well known and unless you use a dedicated good PSU with fixed cable you can never be sure whether you suffer from powering problems or not when you run in any sort of stability problems.

We did some heavy testing the last days with workloads no normal user will ever be able to create (testing reliability and voltage settings for Pine). Without the ability to power the Pine also through the Euler connector I wouldn't been able to test the higher clockspeeds:



No worries: You won't need heatsinks for normal useage. This is all just a test setup to be able to deadlock the board when overclocked. But fortunately the Pine folks already started a collaboration with a heatsink vendor and will provide one later that fits on SoC/DRAM. This is just to illustrate where to inject 5V (red) and GND (black) on the Euler connector.

nevertheless, where did you get these heat sinks from. is there a link that you can share?