Doesn't hold standby power if I crank the car right away

I just thought i would post an update... Alot has happened

So after making all the tweaks with the Zotac board it still was failing (sonofa...) So i bit the bullet and decided to swap out mobo/mem/proc.

I bought the latest ASUS p8H67-I Deluxe board and was so happy thinking that everything would work... well it doeasn't (motherhubbard...)

Sooooooo now i am ditching the powersupply and reviving my Opus 150 (can't bare to spend another dime). VegasGuy is running the same board with a 160w M2-ATX with a beefier proc (he has a Core i5 and i have the Core i3).

Now i am just waiting for an adapter for the 20 pin ATX connecter on my PSU and praying that it will be enough to run this board. If not i am willing to try maybe the DSATX

Update:

Stoked!!!! my old Opus 150 is a champ!! So far it's powering this board and processor. I havent connected all my USB devices yet which may saturate the 5v rail but even if i do i have another POL PSU i could run to power those devices. I thought for sure i was going to have to replace my 3.5" drive with an SSD but for now at least i am ready to put this back in the car for real world tests

I must have gone through at least 20 sleep cycles so far and there hasn't been one hickup. We will see how it performs the rest of this week

Great to hear you’re getting somewhere; if the Opus is indeed one of the better designed units then it may not suffer this silly glitch under certain conditions. Look forward to your tests.

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Originally Posted by Mickz

Great to hear you’re getting somewhere; if the Opus is indeed one of the better designed units then it may not suffer this silly glitch under certain conditions. Look forward to your tests.

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I got the computer in the car today. Things are great. This motherboard rocks. POST is super quick. Resume from standby is faster than the Zotac board and of course resume from hibernation is quicker too with the UEFI BIOS it posts in a couple seconds. Another thing that i like about this board is that when in standby the power LED flashes. Since i ran the reset button, HDD LED and Power LED up front to my dash i can tell now when the computer is in sleep mode or if the tank battery drained.

I did about 20 standby/resume cycles in the car today and had no failures. Thats about 40 cycles total with no issues. I don't suspect there will be any since i never had any issues with the Opus 150 when i used it before. As i suspected i am drawing too much on the 5v rail. If i reboot with 4/6 of my USB devices plugged in, it hangs on the splash screen at POST. The interesting thing is that it seems to work with more devices plugged in if it resumes from standby instead of a reset or restart. Must be a power spike as the motherboard starts up. I guess i can live without my 3g card, USB capture device for the rear view camera and the bluetooth adapter for a little while.

Anyhow i anticipated this since the load calculator that i used said i needed about 200w. Good thing i have an 80w 12v / 5v POL power supply. Next thing i need to do is get that in play and move some devices over to a powered USB hub.

I'll keep this thread updated as i continue testing through the next couple weeks

That seems to confirm my findings that the problem of intermittent failure to come out STR is a PSU design fault, or more to the point, a lack of design on start-up in this critical time sensitive mode.

There are so many variables in each car installation that it’s hard to find two people with the same set of conditions. The voltage swings, surges and spikes are completely different between different size starter motors, earthing systems, batteries, alternators, vehicle wiring, battery state of charge and cable runs to the PSU-PC. If an AUX battery is used then the way the AUX battery is wired, it’s state of charge and the point of connection with respect to the PC-PSU supply cabling is different in each installation and they all affect the DC input to the PSU during that critical few hundred milliseconds start-up time at resume from STR.

Will be interesting to see how it works out.

BTW: It makes sense (if I read your post correctly) for USB power to be less sensitive on resume if standby +5v has not been removed as there will be little or no surge current needed charge various caps in USB devices. That’s usually the tipping point on a cold restart.

I think i have made some progress. Once i had the second power supply in place and powering only the USB hub i began having a different issue. The mother board would lose power momentarily at start up and do a reset. This wouldn't happen if i unplugged the external power to the hub. So i put a multimeter on the 5v rail of the aux power supply and found that i had a reading of 4.3ish volts even when the power was off. That obviously dropped when i disconnected the hub's power cord or usb cable.

It was clear to me that i needed to install a diode into the power cable powering the hub because the two power supplies (main standby power and aux power to the hub) werent playing nice together somehow dirtying the 5v supply at startup and causeing the motherboard to reset.

After the diode was in place i had no further issues and i am running almost all of my external USB devices now. I need to get a new GPS device that is USB and not serial since this new board doesn't have a serial port and my cheapo USB 2.0 video capture device for the reverse camera is either damaged, drawing too much power or it doesnt like the hub its on cause it shows up as unrecognized after a driver install.

Both minor things. The main thing is it is very stable and i havent had any indications of any other issues. I will indeed continue to monitor things and report any findings as they arise.

Thanks again for all who participated in helping me isolate my issues

I thought I would post a small update. My system has been stable for almost a month now. I have resumed from standby successfully every single time I have entered my car and the aux battery I have in place is holding a standby charge for over two days which is sufficient for my habbits.

The opus 150 was originally a concern because I was right on the limit with the unit. However I made some adjustments to optimize. I removed the 3.5" drive and replaced it with a 2.5" drive. I also added an additional fan above the power supply to optimize cooling at full load.

I replaced my GPS (Delmore serial GPS) with I-blu USB GPS recommended by centrafuse and I am quite pleased. I have much better reception and much faster update times.

Today I actually got my USB video grabber working for my reverse camera. I did this by plugging it in to one of the USB3 slots. I have to assume it wasn't getting enough power. I think changing to a laptop drive helped as well.

The last two things I have to get working is a workable bluetooth device and my Verizon air card.

I am slowly adding things to the setup so I know when a peripheral is causing issues.

Anyways I am so happy to finally have a stable system. All it took was replacing almost every single component of the the carpc! Lol

Great news, FIY, I have finally prove (to myself) that the M4 will drop its bundle at start-up with a changing input at just the right transition.

A rewire of part of the input supply has reduced it to almost zero (almost) finally proved it with running hibernate and caught the M4 doing the occasional start – stop and restart (very quickly,) had it been STR it would have failed to boot correctly.

Looked at the larger OPUS the other day, if I have any more problems I’ll get one.

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Originally Posted by antimatter

Anyways I am so happy to finally have a stable system. All it took was replacing almost every single component of the the carpc! Lol

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Gee I don't feel so bad now :tard:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mickz

Great news, FIY, I have finally prove (to myself) that the M4 will drop its bundle at start-up with a changing input at just the right transition.

A rewire of part of the input supply has reduced it to almost zero (almost) finally proved it with running hibernate and caught the M4 doing the occasional start – stop and restart (very quickly,) had it been STR it would have failed to boot correctly.

Looked at the larger OPUS the other day, if I have any more problems I’ll get one.



Gee I don't feel so bad now :tard:

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When you have a few free moments could you go into more detail of what you did to rewire the input supply that reduced the symptoms down to "almost zero". I could deal with 1/50 failures.... but 1/5 failures was just too much to bare. I assume this is going to be car specific but i may be able to translate this to my setup if i ever go back to the M4-ATX.

Although if the old Opus 150 does fail i will get their updated 170w one (same size as the 150) since the 150w seems to handle my load fine once i optimized with lower power consumtion parts.

One thing that i didn't mention was replacing the M4-ATX with the Opus 150 also solved my display issue... I had all sorts of interference (wavey lines) in my lilliput. it was really quite annoying.

One more thing I thought I would mention...My isolator although it says it takes 15 seconds to decide before it connects the two positives I did notice that it connects them right away... literally as soon as the car starts which may account for why there is a change in voltage as the computer starts. I assume if you can mitigate this some how you can reduce the symptom.

I have yet to call the mfg of the isolator to discuss this... there may be some way to set a delay... perhaps removing the isolator all together and doing the charge lamp isolator setup may mitigate this. I have yet to do this since if it ain't broke don't fix it...lol