Hi Jake, I don't think anyone has done quite what you're planning. In HERA we have no FPGA fans and only external airflow, but in our case we place the SNAP boards in RFI-enclosures, with the FPGA thermally coupled to the enclosure case via aluminium blocks and thermal compound. Our experience with this is that the FPGA has runs at perfectly reasonable temperatures, though we have been having some issues with keeping our PSU chips cool. We're probably going to resort to coupling these to the enclosure case with more thermal compound / chunks of metal. This probably isn't really relevant to you, though I thought I'd tell the story anyway :)
I think in your case with some airflow over the board itself, you'll probably be fine, but if you want to do some tests: If you're using casperfpga and the 10GbE microblaze interface, there is a method: CasperFpga.transport.get_temp() which will report the temperature of the FPGA. If you're using the raspberrypi/Katcp interface, there is this XAdc class ( https://github.com/casper-astro/mlib_devel/blob/master/jasper_library/sw/xadc.py) which can be used to get FPGA temperature / voltage. Instantiate it by passing the constructor a CasperFpga instance. Essentially the get_temp call just reads a register called "xadc" and scales it to get degrees C. Cheers Jack On Tue, 16 Oct 2018 at 19:41 Jake Jones <jake.jo...@curtin.edu.au> wrote: > Dear All, > > We are exploring the possibility of mounting several SNAP boards > vertically side by side in a custom rack. Ideally we want to mount them as > close as feasibly possible by removing the stock fan. > > We plan on using only a passive heat sink and an external airflow > solution. Does anyone have any experience operating the SNAP board without > the fan installed? > If so, how did the SNAP board perform with respect to thermals? > > We also have concerns that cross-talk could be a problem when mounting the > boards in such close proximity. Any advise with respect to this? > > Thanks, > > *Jake Jones* > Engineering Graduate Intern | Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy > > Curtin University > Location | 610.115 > Email | jake.jo...@curtin.edu.au > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups " > casper@lists.berkeley.edu" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to casper+unsubscr...@lists.berkeley.edu. > To post to this group, send email to casper@lists.berkeley.edu. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "casper@lists.berkeley.edu" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to casper+unsubscr...@lists.berkeley.edu. To post to this group, send email to casper@lists.berkeley.edu.
