power supply

[gbjensen]

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)

[Astondb5]

I power my board with the same 5v 2a power cord I use for my RPi B+ and it seems to work fine.

[ruyaguilar]

Has anyone tried a 1500 ma charger. I can't get the board to boot up get a red light every time i plug it in Only have chargers that are 5 V 1500 ma

What kind of charger is that? "Intelligent" charger?
I suspect these may not work that well since they negotiate with the device, then provide the A required.
And if they cannot determine what kind of device you have, they will only provide 500ma to the device, which in this case, is too low to power the Pine.

I have an Anker 5 port intelligent charger and I'm pretty positive that charger will not be able to power the Pine.

Will be using my iPad's charger instead with a Blackberry's microUSB cable. It's rated this:
10W USB power adapter
Input: 100-240V~, 0.45A 50-60Hz
Output: 5.1V, 2.1A

Edit: I was dreaming. 1500ma = 1.5A, which is not sufficient to power the Pine. Get something else please.
As for the above information, I'm leaving it intact "for information" to anyone who has queries about intelligent chargers.

Skim milk thanks for the reply. I could not find a better charger. The best I could find was a GS5 charger that outputs 5V and 2A. I used diferent microUSB cables i had lying around and I still get  red light. I am wondering now if my pine64 might be dead. Or is still a charger issue. 

Any ideas ?

[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...

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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?

[Andrew2]

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

Aliexpress. You find the stuff also on ebay, dx.com and everywhere else. Since TL Lim said they would start to cooperate with a heatsink manufacturer I would check the Pine64's offers first.

And while we're at it... using the cheapest PSU possible is simply asking for trouble. Especially PSU related problems are hard to diagnose so good luck buying cheap crap

We did some power measurements already and it's not possible to exceed 3A/5V (without connected peripherals, this was just heavy CPU load), using the Micro USB connector no chance to exceed 2A/5V so in case you want to do CPU bound number crunching or connect peripherals that need much power be prepared to power the Pine64 through the Euler connector as can be seen in the picture above. If you have normal use cases in mind it's already enough to use any good 5V/2A PSU and a short, good, reliable cable between board and PSU with low resistance (since that's the real problem many Pine backers are suffering from now: crappy chargers combined with crappy cables lead to a crappy experience)

[tllim]

Here are the photo of USB type A to micro-USB power only cable that we recently make. The USB plug is red color indicates this is a "power only cable", there is also a tag (not shown on photo) mentioned power on. We also tear out the cable and make sure our vendor deliver the AWG 20 type.