I received one such computer (made into a decommissioned plexiglass wine cooler with a wooden lid) as a present. The holes on the lid did pretty much nothing. I made the holes bigger, pretty much no impact. I added holes to the bottom to get a natural draft, nearly no impact. I added a fan to the lid, finally a usable system. Natural draft based on buoyancy works but is not a good match for all cases.
While I could see Askarus idea work (leaving aside the question wether it would be sufficient to get rid of enough thermal energy or beeing even very efficient), I'm not very "comfortable" with your idea (but I am certainly less of an "expert" in that regard then you are).The first question that came to my mind (back then when you first proposed it, months ago) was (obviously): Why hasn't anyone else done this before ? It is either not cost effective or has some drawbacks that make it an unviable solution. Don't get me wrong, I have no interest in dismissing your idea, I am just wondering about potential problems that may occur if you are creating an almost direct connection between the user and the inner workings of an electrical device. Are there any obstacles bringing such a device to market, like a special certification beeing needed? And there are of course mechanical problems, like how you integrate it into the case, or what would happen if the case has to endure a shock that leads to a plastic deformation of the metal part, while the synthetic material easily absorbs the shock by elastic deformation. How to avoid corrosion due to the acidic fluid humans usually produce ?
I'm thinking of the docking station.I don't know what I'm talking about -- I failed a course in Thermodynamics about 15 years ago, and that's about it
But I think the Pandora has no heat problem, and the Pyra should not consume too much more power than the Pandora or else its battery life will be crap. If it gets too hot, there should be a mechanism that slows down the processors, to a Pandora level of performance or even lower if needed.
In bursts (e.g. when booting or when starting an application), you want to use the full processing power, but not constantly. It's fine if it can't sustain its max performance for hours and hours.
It's a handheld. Weight and battery life are more important than sustained high performance. I don't want to make it significantly heavier just to get a heatsink/radiator that can sustain top performance for weeks, even though one battery charge will only last an hour at that level of performance.
We will already have a heavier battery and probably a heavier screen. I really want the Pyra to be not too heavy -- it's not just the volume, but also the weight that determines its pocketability (and ergonomy!).
The way I read it, it's not a big problem at all... maybe somewhat bigger than on the pandora, but it's still no PC CPU in terms of heat
Could perhaps the charger and/or dock provide some kind of heatsink in some way? Maybe the charging µUSB port could be thermally connected to the heatsink of the Pyra, and the charger and dock side of the connection could be designed in such a way to provide more heatsink and radiation surface?I'm thinking of the docking station.I don't know what I'm talking about -- I failed a course in Thermodynamics about 15 years ago, and that's about it
But I think the Pandora has no heat problem, and the Pyra should not consume too much more power than the Pandora or else its battery life will be crap. If it gets too hot, there should be a mechanism that slows down the processors, to a Pandora level of performance or even lower if needed.
In bursts (e.g. when booting or when starting an application), you want to use the full processing power, but not constantly. It's fine if it can't sustain its max performance for hours and hours.
It's a handheld. Weight and battery life are more important than sustained high performance. I don't want to make it significantly heavier just to get a heatsink/radiator that can sustain top performance for weeks, even though one battery charge will only last an hour at that level of performance.
We will already have a heavier battery and probably a heavier screen. I really want the Pyra to be not too heavy -- it's not just the volume, but also the weight that determines its pocketability (and ergonomy!).
I think for a device like the Pyra it's important that some people might consider to use the device with a docking station.
I would not want to be throttled while on a dock and do some gaming,
Forcing the processor to a lower clockspeed is the worst solution for me.
This has to be done if everything else fails.
BTW: I'm using my pandora with DisplayLink at work all the time.
It's mostly for playing music but it gets pretty hot already (10% cpu load. Rest is charger and USB)
I would not underestimate that.
With NEON it goes over 120C according to that sensor (without even using the GPU or DSP), but I don't really trust that reading.. Intel CPUs would have crashed or reset long before reaching such temps, but OMAP5 runs fine, so who knows what it's measuring..
This is a bad thing to assume. For example, Exophase did good job parallelizing DraStic and it makes good use of multiple cores. With slow SDL scaling and slow Xorg updates it can already max out both cores.
Maxing out both GPP cores can happen easily enough. But maxing out both GPP cores and the GPU and the DSP and whatever else is in the SoC, simultaneously, that I think is pretty unlikely.
Temp sensors having an offset or strange scaling are not that uncommon, if there's no sensor module that applies known corrections the measured temperature may be off by quite a lot.
This is a nice idea, but this would delay PYRA another Two MonthsTM, I think, and would make the PYRA lid thicker and hence the whole device. Depending on the hinge design, we may have problem with this ribbon cable like we do on the Pandora. But yeah, I like this idea. Well, I like all ideas that prevent the SoC from being throttled down because of overheating. I am a gamer like Askarus, and I would like PYRA to run as fast a it could
I've seen 20C degree shifts with the some of the products I work with.
Added development time aside, this is the time to think of and do such things, not later after it becomes a problem or when an upgrade is slotted to ship. The real engineering concern I think would be how to connect the mainboard to the daughter boards through the hinge with the high data rates etc. And not run into a problem the pandora had with corrupted or broken communication going through the hinge. That is a legitimate concern with that solution. These creative designers reinventing the wheel should be focused on that problem, rather than radiators etc.This is a nice idea, but this would delay PYRA another Two MonthsTM, I think, and would make the PYRA lid thicker and hence the whole device. Depending on the hinge design, we may have problem with this ribbon cable like we do on the Pandora. But yeah, I like this idea. Well, I like all ideas that prevent the SoC from being throttled down because of overheating. I am a gamer like Askarus, and I would like PYRA to run as fast a it could
