IEI-NANO-QM770
Introduction
IEI NANO-QM770 motherboards with Intel i5-3320M processors are used on several Estonian IT College robots: Neve, Õnnetu and others. Currently there is 6 motherboards, CPU-s and coolers: 3 sets definitely in usable condition, 1 dead and 2 possibly usable. One set is used by Neve and other is used by Raul's team. You should be able to locate these boards and related equipment in the plastic box labeled "Intel i5 boards" at the Robotics Club.
Specs
Intel i5-3320M has:
- clock frequency from 2.6GHz up to 3.3GHz in turbo mode
- 2 cores and 4 threads
- L1 cache 32k (86GB/s)
- L2 cache 256k (39GB/s)
- L3 cache 3MB (32GB/s)
- DDR3 SO-DIMM DRAM modules (8.4GB/s)
- Thermal dissipation of 35W
The motherboard has:
- 4x USB3.0 ports
- 2x HDMI, single DVI and single LVDS connector
- Full size miniPCI express port for wireless: there is bunch of suitable cards and antennas in the box.
- 2x SATA 6Gbps ports
- Dimensions of 115x165mm
Notes
Powering the motherboard
The motherboard power connector expects 12V, but Raul reported that it's usable within range of 10.8V to 14.6V. Lauri tested the motherboard under full load with four instances of burnP6, youtube on webbrowser, wifi connected, single PS3 eye camera, Arduino Mega 2560 connected. The power supply used was rated at 5A with current limiting turned up to max, with 3A power supply the board rebooted randomly!
13.1V 2.76A Works fine 12V 2.97A Works fine as well 11.04V 3.25A Connectivity to Intel SSD was lost repeatedly: SATA link went down, filesystem was mounted read-only, might have been due to a faulty SATA cable 10.65V 3.15A Seemed stable with Kingston 32GB SSD 10V 3.3A Again seemed stable with Kingston
Four LiFePo4 cells in series should have fully charged voltage of 14.4V and after some time it drops to 13.2V.
At up to 6A rate (1C for 6Ah battery) and cell discharge cutoff at 3V (12V in total) we should be able to make use of 85% of a LiFe battery capacity. In other words if the voltage of the battery pack drops down to 12V it can already be considered "empty".
With about 40W of power consumption under full load and 5000mAh battery we should achieve uptime of at least 1.5 hours which is plenty.
While idling the board consumes about 15W so expect uptime of at least 4 hours.
Dropping the cutoff voltage to 2.7V which is also the lowest threshold on the configurable battery alarm, we should be able to utilize nearly 95% of the battery capacity.
TODO
Super Hardware Monitor + LPC I/O chip
Figure out how to read power supply voltage from the Fintek f71889f chip, sensors-detect does not seem to find it but it should sit on some bus. This way we could determine battery charge percentage from within the software. Interestingly the chip has 50+ GPIO pins, perhaps we could use those to drive H-bridges?
Potential successor platforms
Gigabyte Brix series seems interesting choice for replacing this board in the future. Currently there are available GB-BSi6-6200 for and GB-BSi5H-6200 for 391€ which has extra room for 2.5" HDD/SDD.
Both of them are equipped with Intel i5-6200U which has very similar specs to i5-3320M above:
- Clock frequency of 2.3-2.8GHz
- 2 cores/4 threads
- 3M cache
- Thermal dissipation of 25W TDP
In addition to the BRIX we need:
This means total cost of around 535€ per robot. The BRIX-es could be of course usable as workstations as well :)
Most BRIX-es require 19V power supply, but Lauri tried powering his BRIX with 12V/3A power supply and he managed to enter BIOS at least so there is hope that we can power BRIX-es directly from LiFe cell like the board above.
