- Get a good power supply > 5.0V < 5.5V
- Get a good MicroSD card
- If not, you’re going to waste a lot of time.
Boot
GPIO Header
Board Hardware
Peripheral Hardware Guides
- Waveshare RS485 CAN HAT
- Waveshare HDMI Display with SPI Touch Screen
- ILI9341 320x240 SPI Displays
- ILI9486 480x320 SPI Displays
- Realtek USB WiFi Dongles
RE the substantial heatsink that is a feature of the “Alta”, I was wondering whether you might be able to tell me if I can safely and easily remove it?
I ask because I want to use the Alta as a drop-in replacement for a Raspberry Pi 3B+ in a pi-top [3] laptop shell.
Whilst I have been able to fit the Alta inside the shell, in order to be able to use it I need to connect the cooling bridge from the Alta’s GPIO pins to the B2B connector on the shell’s Hub.
Due to the way the cooling bridge is shaped, I can’t do this without removing the Alta’s heatsink.
Normally I wouldn’t worry too much about removing a heatsink but normally that’s because I’ve installed the heatsink myself. I received the Alta as a present and am just a little apprehensive about removing the heatsink without Libre Computer’s guidance.
I would really appreciate your support in this matter and look forward to hearing from you soon.
The heatsink can be removed.
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Thank you for your quick response.
I should have been more specific because what I’m really seeking advice on is:
Can the heatsink be easily removed by hand* without any risk of de-lidding the CPU/RAM, or causing damage to the PCB?
*in the same way I would remove a heatsink I’d applied myself with thermal pads to a Raspberry Pi 3B+, for example
Yes, you should be able to remove it without damaging anything.
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Great - thank you very much for your help!
@librecomputer is there a hardware enablement table showing mainline kernel status for the A311D, like the one Collabora has for the RK3588?
Looking at another thread, I’m trying to understand if there’s anything I need to do to connect a PWM Servo Board using I2C to the Alta board.
When I used Le-Potato, I did have to enable i2c-1 interface, and that was pretty straight forward. but that is not the case with the Alta board.
I know I’m not an electronics expert, so am asking for some help/guidance to advance my project (autonomous RC car)
Thanks!
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Hello, Could I please have some clarification:
I’ve received an Alta labelled AML-A311D-CC-V1.0C
Documentation and files available reference:
V1, V01-preprod and V02-preprod
Which of the three boards does V1.0C correspond to, or is this a fourth, yet undocumented board variant? I don’t want to accidentally flash the wrong firmware image.
V1.0C means V1 with Type-C
Revisions are minor increments, eg V1.1C
Minor versions have no software changes.
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Oh thank you for that! I’d missed your reply but that’s a really useful resource to have!
Following this comment by j tremblant beneath CNX-Software’s Odroid N2+ article:
“My N2+ has been working 100% stable for almost 48 hours. N2+ is a monster ARM64 CPU,with insane response times and crazy fast loading times under ubuntu-desktop 64bit 20.04 with official 4.9.230-92 kernel. Running smooth at 37 degrees under full load, with 80mm active cooling of course and was easily OC’d to 2.4Ghz(A73) and 2.02Ghz(A53). I’m USB3 booting with a Samsung T5 1Tb and was getting only 275MB/sec because UAS was disabled for compatibility issues. Had to edit the kernel source, built the image to enable UAS and trim and It bumped my T5 SSD reading speeds to 348MB/sec. I don’t like the large metal screws standing out at the bottom of the unit after installing the 80mm fan. So far so good.I received it sooner because I’m a prefered customer, who spends big bucks with them on a regular basis. lol. Enjoy your N2+.”
(though as noted by tkaiser:
Summary
" hdparm for storage benchmarks is plain BS (though the recommended tool of choice in the little weird SBC consumer world). It uses a hardcoded 128K block size for reading which was huge back then when this setting was defined (most probably already in last century) but is nothing today.
If you test with reasonable (today’s) block sizes you should get close to or above 400 MB/s.")
@librecomputer The part I’ve highlighted in bold - would you mind telling us what the UAS and TRIM status is for the Alta, please?
We don’t use vendor kernel. Upstream supports UAS.
So UAS is already built in, effectively, because you use the upstream kernel?
I bought a case with a PWM fan, and tried looking up the pinout (for the alta) and use ldto to enable pwm for the fan (like in tutorials for other libre boards), but no pwm fan overlay to enable.
How do I accomplish this? I’ve connected the yellow fan wire to pin 3 (GPIOAO_3) and the blue to pin 7 (GPIOAO_6), and red to 5v and black to ground.