A bunch of questions on the db410c

Products Support DragonBoard410c
#1

Since I’ll be receiving a board sometime this week, here are my initial Qs.

  1. Is there a TIM(Thermal Interface Material) between the SoC and the RF shield over it, ie does the rf shield double up as a heatsink?
  2. Most stable Linux/GNU build
  3. Most stable AOSP build
  4. State of Freedreno gallium driver on the linux/gnu builds (Mesa version etc)
  5. Any suggestions other suggestion the community would like to give on the db410c

Thank

#2

Hi @ric96

Welcome to the 410c family.

I can answer a couple of your questions, but I’ll leave the some of them to other members to answer.

  1. TIM/Heatsink. No there is an air-gap between the SOC and the shield. The shield is intended to prevent RF emissions that interfere with the GPS. Since the 96Boards specs expect a Mezzanine board above the SOC (7-8mm between boards) there really isn’t a lot of space for a heatsink, instead we have provided a thermal path out the bottom of the board. There is an example heatsink here: https://www.element14.com/community/community/designcenter/single-board-computers/blog/2016/02/01/cooling-the-dragonboard-410c-and-ifc6410p but this is really overkill for most applications, the copper in the PCB is sufficient heatsink for all but the most extreme compute loads. The 410c will throttle back if it gets too hot.

2)The most stable build it the most recent release from Linaro, version 17.06.

Full Disclosure: I am an employee of Qualcomm Canada, any opinions I may have expressed in this or any other post may not reflect the opinions of my employer.

#3

Thanks for your reply, a follow up question. Is the rf shield completely
soldered on to the pcb or the top can be manually removed like in many
cases.

#4
  1. Most stable AOSP build

16.03 is the most stable Android build. The 16.06 had problems with USB for many users (building the latest version from source can also workaround these issues.

  1. State of Freedreno gallium driver on the linux/gnu builds (Mesa version etc)

Not quite sure what you are after… IIRC DB410C has OpenGL ES hardware but the driver emulates enough missing OpenGL features to allow it to run a WM with a couple of simple effects and run tuxracer (although it is only playable at very low resolutions).

Anyhow:

Extended renderer info (GLX_MESA_query_renderer):
    Vendor: freedreno (0x5143)
    Device: FD307 (0xffffffff)
    Version: 13.0.6
    Accelerated: yes
    Video memory: 10MB
    Unified memory: yes
    Preferred profile: core (0x1)
    Max core profile version: 3.1
    Max compat profile version: 3.0
    Max GLES1 profile version: 1.1
    Max GLES[23] profile version: 3.0
#5

@danielt thanks for the info, exactly what i was looking for about mesa…