I am not the voice of BPI team,
but I realized that DC is a better choice for development boards.
However, it is not that MicroUSB is bad, it is just that development boards should have more power for add-ons. With a MicroUSB plugged in to my phone when I am gaming the phone charges incredibly slowly b/c the game is power hungry. Note that the phone also does not have ports taking power from it like USB ports and stuff.
On a development board however the 5V 2A cannot cover all the power needs for the SoC and extension ports on the board.
One intersting thing to note is both the DC port and MicroUSB port are rated at 2A from the adapter. I guess the cable of the MicroUSB can account for some power loss and a higher amp rated DC adapter will provide more power.
And where is this ‘voice of BPI team’? Aren’t they able to answer simple questions regarding their products? Is all we can expect here wild guesses from other individuals?
And the other problem is that the micro USB connector let people try to use the most crappy phone chargers ever to power their device. That might work on devices that do not consume that much (Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi M1/M1+ or the cell phones the chargers were bought for) but not with the power-hungry M3.
Anyway: Given this lousy decision, the slow USB-to-SATA bridge, all the broken OS images (why not just one that works instead of many that all suck in one way or the other?) and the non-existent support situation it’s clear now what to do: Avoid the M3 and close the account here.
Sup, can we get info it there will be some kind of normal apt\pac repo for the systems to not go the fancy burning the img update procedure?
Also the board works like a charm, got hard wired it to a normal PSU , plus some active colling with thermal sinks and 52c* like a charm, thou it hangs on very long term hard cpu tasks like video decoding. I’m in a bit of investigation, probably the mount for the disk or the ntfs-3g is failing, or just some random out of memory.
Ow ow and…please can we next time have a real sata, really really real sata? I really want to put a dev board on a custom build case to handle the webserver\tomcat\db. maybe some raid stuff. And it would be like great to have it like in router for factor , like those R series but with less Ethernets, like only 2.
Also one minus i encountered, thou the low cpu speed it handles really sad with apps that depend on fast cpu cycles, that’s the most disappointment :<
the SinoVoip Foxconn jungle, where rarley any development happens 