[Solved]Need Help with Power Supply Spec: Has Pico Cluster completely screwed me up ?

[axelf]

Hi All,
        I purchased 10 x RockPro64 + 64GB eMMC + NVMe PCIe Card  for my cluster.

I then purchased a PicoCluster 10H (High Power) RockPro64 Case PSU Kit etc etc.

I have had 3 months of sheer hell getting the cluster working with any degree of stability.

Their wiring loom was so unprofessional I should have had the alarm bells ringing at the beginning.

They were shoving 3-4 awg 22 cables into fork crimps rated at awg 14-16 and the cable insulation was not properly secured as a strain relief. The power would intermittently drop if you wiggled the cables too much.

So I rewired the loom .. and in doing this I noticed the power supply was 5v 18A   ...

When I checked the specs of the Rock Pro 64 it says 12v 3A minimum .

Am I right to go ballistic at PICO Cluster for this massive bit of incompetence?

I don't know if the spec has changed on the Rock Pro 64 and it was 5v 3A?

I am surprised that the RockPro64 would even boot on 5V when it was rated at 12v!

[dkryder]

well i think different parts of the board are on different rails. so it probably boots ok and somewhat operates. but as to the mix up just report it to them. it's a good chance it was some newbie builder stupid mistake or an oversight. i doubt they build them intentionally like that or there would be other stupid stuff going on also that there would be reports in the media of.
grab a copy of this and you'll see that the 12v is mostly for the pcie and eDP. the rest is 5, 3.3, 1.8 etc.
http://files.pine64.org/doc/rockpro64/ro...20-SCH.pdf

[axelf]

well i think different parts of the board are on different rails. so it probably boots ok and somewhat operates. but as to the mix up just report it to them. it's a good chance it was some newbie builder stupid mistake or an oversight. i doubt they build them intentionally like that or there would be other stupid stuff going on also that there would be reports in the media of.
grab a copy of this and you'll see that the 12v is mostly for the pcie and eDP. the rest is 5, 3.3, 1.8 etc.
http://files.pine64.org/doc/rockpro64/ro...20-SCH.pdf

Thanks for the link very helpful.

PicoCluster have shipped me a replacement PSU this time rated at 100w 12v and a stepdown converter for the 5V fan cases.

It should enable me to to get the NVMe PCIe working so I can start developing. 

Its a peak limitation of 0.8A per unit ... so I it will be interesting to see how the units cope when I put them under load :-0

Getting a unit that has teh power is not the issue ... its fitting it in the PicoCluster case.