Raspberry Pi Throwdown

Who needs an excuse to torment cheap hardware??
I challenge everyone to a raspberry Pi Hwbot prime contest!!

Contest will end as the year ends! 12/31/2013
This should give everyone time to get a r-Pi and learn to use it.

If voltmods or cooling mods are done, please add a picture.

Winner will be determined by looking at
Raspberry Pi records at Hwbot

You can pick one of these up for $35. Here for U.S. They are also fun to mess around with and have quite a bit of utility other than overclocking, (if they survive), media streaming, automation, etc.

Here are some links to help you out.
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?p=7527944#post7527944

http://forum.hwbot.org/showthread.php?p=257267#post257267

Awesome! This'll be fun. Good reason for me to buy a new pi.

Buying one

I suspect this will get crazy in no time at all. and will be entertaining

Wait, do you get points for this on the bot?

Let me know if you want a voltmod
I take orders from Mild through Wild.
Gotta fund my next Pie somehow!

No points yet.

This is right up my alley. So you have a working voltmod bob?

There are no points for that particular benchmark. There are not many sub's, so it will be fun to see if we could dominate the ranks.

Bobnova, are these open source? It seems likely that there may be a schematic floating around somewhere.

You can't voltmod them in the classic sense as the MOSFETs, controller, vSense/FB/ISense/etc. is all internal.
Only the input voltage/filter cap, inductor, and output voltage/filter cap is external.
On the plus side, that means you can peel the inductor off and attach your own voltage regulator.
Unfortunately I fried mine before I got to the point of testing whether it'd boot with an unhappy integrated regulator. There may be a PowerGood signal internally that causes issues.
Also unfortunately the chip itself has an NDA datasheet.

If there is a PowerGood signal that makes things more awkward.

The Pi has a schematic available that likely includes a pinmap, so if that PowerGood signal is exposed (assuming it exists) somewhere it could be abused horribly and probably worked around.
I really need to get another Pi, just hard to justify at the moment

Worst case you can set 1.4V in BIOS(firmware, software, whatever) and then play Mean Games feeding more voltage to the output side of the inductor through a diode (to prevent backfeed). It'd be awkward, but it might work.


In short, I'm almost certain it's doable somehow.



EDIT:
Looked at the schematics...



Now I/we just need to find it on the board. I have a suspicioun that it'll only exist under the chip, but there may be a via, almost all the chip's BGA pins/pads seem to have vias under them. That said, note the lack of resistors on the vFB line.
What this does mean is that we may be able to sidetrack the inductor so it feeds a dummy load and the vFB pin, while the core is actually powered off something else entirely.

around these forums we will call this "ednovation"

I call it avoiding cleaning the kitchen

Well... It looks like I have some work to do when I get home!

I wonder which versions clock the best, UK or China... I know Chinese ones use hynix vs the UK variants Samsung chip

Arrived today..... Let the games begin


BTW I have no idea what I'm doing

Let's see it

There appears to be a new dog in town: http://forum.hwbot.org/showthread.php?t=82233

EDIT -

Bobnova said:

What this does mean is that we may be able to sidetrack the inductor so it feeds a dummy load and the vFB pin, while the core is actually powered off something else entirely.

Click to expand...

Epower on a Raspberry Pi!!!

Jeelabs did a thing on that thing a while ago: http://jeelabs.org/2013/06/23/more-about-the-odroidu2/

$100 or so, but that's not bad considering what you get.

Took me like 2 hrs to get a working os, trying to find a download that wasn't corrupt in some way was a mission, I ended up having to use the "noob" package to install a os, god help us when I try to overclock the damn thing

ln2 or it didnt happen.

Having a Nightmere already with this little thing..... I can't get any os to write the boot/config.txt file which we need to overclock the damn thing, everytime I go to read it ($ sudo nano boot/config.txt) it brings up a blank screen, obviously the config.txt as the heading is at the top of the screen and all the action keys shortcuts are at the bottom but there's no txt at all, I've flashed the sd card multiple times with wheezy and noobs (once I figured out how to do it lol) but always the same blank config.txt

Any ideas?