Hi Ben & Brad, Those certainly are interesting and inexpensive low profile ATX power supplies, and it’s also interesting to see others are home brewing power supply schemes for the ROACH2. Thanks for the reference—I’d be interested, for example, to see if Mini Box Pico’s are available with Line In.
That said, I should point out that you have referenced 80W rated (@ input) power supplies, whereas the ROACH2—depending on factors such as bit code size, clock rate, which ADCs and how many SFP+ mezzanines are installed, which of the on-board-off-FPGA resources such as DDR3, QDR and PPC are used, and a derating factor for altitude (e.g. in Brad’s balloon, or in our case on Mauna Kea) can definitely require a 250W rated ATX power supply like the one specified. TLDR: 80W ATX PSU might work for a stripped down ROACH2 application, still it is not an adequate worst case rating in general. Regards, Jonathan > On Jul 7, 2016, at 5:32 PM, Brad Dober <do...@sas.upenn.edu> wrote: > > Those PicoPSUs shouldn't fail even under vacuum. > We have flown them (specifically these: > http://www.mini-box.com/PicoPSU-80-WI-32V ) on a balloon payload twice before. > > > Brad Dober > Ph.D. Candidate > Department of Physics and Astronomy > University of Pennsylvania > Cell: 262-949-4668 > > On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 5:26 PM, <bma...@physics.ucsb.edu> wrote: > > We use a beefy 12V power supply and feed these: > http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-80 > > They are very small and convenient. > > We have run 8 of them in our ROACH crate for probably a year of integrated > time without a failure. We have 10 in our new ROACH2 crate and we’ll see > how they hold up there over the coming year. > > Ben > __________________________________________________________________ > Ben Mazin Phone/Fax: 805-893-3344 > Associate Professor http://mazinlab.org > Department of Physics Skype: bmazin.work > University of California Office: 2015H Broida Hall > Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA Lab: 3509 Broida Hall > > >
