A20 Lime 2 cooling required?

[eccentric]

I recently purchased a lime2 board with the nice case for it. Upon setting it up, and booting the official olimex image I was having stability problems where the machine would seemingly freeze up or power off. I tried the images provided by olimex and armbian, but still was having problems. I tried a bunch of different power supplies assuming that might be the issue, but the problem continued. At some point I thought it might be the power buttons getting hit on the case or something like that so I removed the board from the case, and things improved. Less issues, but still time to time it would freeze up and power off.

I then realized it might be cooling and so I put a 120mm fan beside the board on the desk, and sure enough nothing I can do can make it crash with the fan running. It ran without issue for two plus days. I removed the fan, and it froze up 10 or so minutes later.


Should this board require cooling? I assume it shouldn't and the case obviously is not setup for that in any way. I'm running the board in a 20C ambient temperature room which I assume should be fine.

I did some measurements, and after about 10 minutes of sitting idle after booting the olimex image the CPU temp gets to about 50C (measured externally with a laser temperature tool).


I tried putting a heatsink on the cpu but it still seems to get very hot and has issues.

Any thoughts? I think if I mount a fan on it, it seems like it would run just fine. Is this normal, or is there something wrong with this particular board maybe?

[soenke]

We are running heavy Realtime-load on a lot of A20-Boards with heatsinks in custom enclosures and had no temperature issues so far. So maybe there is some hardware/kernel config issue with your board or use a bigger power supply (>2A). Maybe also try lower clock speeds and see if that changes anything.