The developer kit comes with a 19 VDC power brick, but I’ve seen the power input is rated as 5.5-19.6VDC.
I want to power the jetson from a PC ATX PSU, where I can either use 12VDC or 17VDC (using -12V and 5V wires)
Will the kit work with these inputs? Would you recommend 12V or 17V?
Thanks.
The voltages should work, but the design of a PC’s PSU has issues due to being a switching power supply. These supplies must be under a minimum load of about 10% before they can regulate. It is unlikely that the supply would be stable with just a Jetson…you’d have to add an additional load for it to regulate.
Typically when a PC starts up there may be a very tiny delay between pushing the button and seeing the motherboard come alive…this is the supply checking for whether regulation is occurring. There may be cases where a failed load causes a PC to start up and initially look like it is running, and then mysteriously turn itself off…I would expect something similar to this if you just connect a Jetson directly to such a supply.
Here is one article on the topic:
[url]http://jumperone.com/2012/12/converting-atx-power-supply-to-bench-power-supply-faq/[/url]
@linuxdev thanks, I knew about that, and I have the psu powering also 4x3.5" hdds.
Also the power supply is not that big - 300W
You think that would do it for load?
300W is far beyond what is required even with 4 hard drives (on top of the Jetson you have to add power for USB devices, SATA devices, and PCIe devices…but the max for the Jetson TX1 itself is probably under 30W…a TX2 peaks at 15W…most of the time a TX1 is probably under 10 or 15W). There is some inductance when load is from a hard drive since it has motors (unless they are solid state), and inductive loads do not help with stabilizing a switch mode power supply. You need a resistive load if it is to gain the minimum load for stable operation.