06-12-2016, 06:00 PM
(06-11-2016, 10:55 PM)clackamas Wrote: The main question I have is do I need to add a ploy (or other) fuse (as he describes) to protect from short circuits?Hi Henry,
Since you're using multiple pine64 boards in an array, I would be tempted to put standard glass fuses inline with the power supply line into each pine64. A polyfuse is good as it self-resets, but that can also hide a problem, unless you know that the device has triggered the fuse and why. Plain glass fuses are cheap, and if you were to put 1.5/2A fuses on each pine64, I don't see why they would blow those fuses unless something went wrong (as I have yet to see a properly working pine64 need more than 800ma @ 5v for just the main board+wifi, without the LCD or peripherals on the USB).
At an absolute minimum, you would want a single fuse between the power supply and the cluster, rated at just more than what you expect the maximum power from the cluster to be (for 5 pines, a fuse between 7.5A -10A would do), so the power supply doesn't get overloaded (although modern computer power supplies do have good self-protection circuitry in them, and generally shut down if anything goes wrong, but it's never good to blindly rely on that!).
Pete
