What is the min and max temperature range that ROCK-PI-X is designed to operate on and why it is limited?
Operating temperature range
“Why” is easier to answer:
- thermal expansion can cause physical stress especially near solder joints if components heat unevenly
- prolonged or repeated high temperature exposures can damage components, eg. electrolytic capacitors. read the datasheet for the various components used and you’ll often see a soldering temperature profile which describes how the components must be heated so as to not damage them while soldering.
- silicon junctions can have negative temperature coefficients causing thermal runaway. hot component conducts more energy, gets hotter, conducts more energy, gets hotter … catches fire.
- oscillators change frequency with temperature. if oscillators run out of their expected frequency range parts could behave badly, eg. memory not being refreshed quickly enough, signals might not have time to propagate across a chip, analog components (wifi/bt radios) operate on the wrong frequency, …
- it’s more expensive to design, manufacture, test, and certify components to work correctly over broad temperature ranges.
I’d guess that 0-60C is the temperature range, but check the hardware page, read the datasheets, and take the intersection of the various temperatures: the processor is specified for 0-90C, the bt/wifi module is specified for -30 - 65C, the ethernet is 0-70, the emmc had a 60C test temperature…