Pynq Heating Issues

[omn0mn0m]

Hey all, just got a Pynq Z1 board in the mail. I was reading the documentation on the Jupyter notebook when my arm hovered over the board and I felt some heat. After gently touching the various chips on the board, I noticed that most of the components felt warm or hot. I tried to put a 15mm x 15mm heatsink on the Zynq to see if that would solve any issues. It did not. I do not have a thermometer to measure exact temperatures unfortunately.

Has anyone else had this problem, or do I have a defective board? Most other FPGA/ SoC dev boards I have worked with have not gotten this hot unless I was running something intense on it.

[jpeyron]

Hi @omn0mn0m,

When you are noticing the heat issue is the board running a project or just powered on? How are you powering the Pynq-Z1 board usb or wallwart? Is any of the components hot enough to warrant not touching them? The only forum thread that I have found dealing with the Pynq-Z1 and heat is here. On a similar board I have found components to be warm when running some basic led/switch/button project but I did not find the components to be untouchable. 

cheers,

Jon

[omn0mn0m]

@jpeyron,

The board was just powered on with me connected to it through my web browser. I have been powering the board using USB, with the jumper connected to USB accordingly. There were no components that were too hot to touch, but the Zynq (with and without heatsink) was getting close to untouchable.

I am concerned with the board reaching damaging amounts of heat if I try to run something like vision processing on it. I am looking at this board on behalf of a few student-run clubs at my university due to its price. Our applications for it would be mostly in the realms of cybersecurity or robotics.

[jpeyron]

Hi @omn0mn0m,

The ZYNQ can sustain up to +85 Celsius degrees operational temperature. I do not think the heat you mentioned with having the board connected a web browser is a problem. In the other thread the customer had the pynq image for booting and with jupyter note book the on board temperature sensor graph was around 67 degree Celsius only after just booting and powered though USB.. Since you have already added a heat sink you can also use a fan for the PYNQ-Z1. Unfortunately, we do not sell fans but hopefully you can find a small fan locally, if you fear that the temperature will deteriorate your device. 

thank you,

Jon

[elodg]

Open the XADC graph in Vivado Hardware Manager to see the FPGA die temperature. Make sure boot mode is set to JTAG.

It is normal for the board to get warm.