Penta SATA HAT on ROCK3a questions

barsikus007 · January 6, 2022, 11:41pm

I have several questions about design of Penta SATA HAT kit with Rock3a

First question is about cooling.
The black radiator plate is designed for rockpi 4, but on rockpi 3a there is no contact between black radiator plate and board (pic1,2)

Anyway, I tested temp with this command
stress --cpu 8 --io 4 --vm 4 --vm-bytes 1024M --timeout 60s
and checked temps with
sudo cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp
and it was 60C. Is it ok for this cooling setup?
One more thing. As you see in first picture, there is square thermal pad, but in video assembly guide there is no thermal pads. Where I should place that? It is thinner than gap on picture 2 so I think it won’t help.

Second question is about type-c port, which is blocked by case. Maybe you need to make hole for this port in next version of this kit.
Anyway, can I make this port available without drilling case (maybe plume or smth else)?

Third question is for SPI jumper
Should I short-circuit it, as mentioned here (https:// wiki.radxa .com/Rock3/hardware/3a)? Does NAS software uses SPI or flash?

jack · January 7, 2022, 2:26am

The assemble video is for ROCK Pi 4, it needs some update for ROCK 3A.

Second question is about type-c port, which is blocked by case. Maybe you need to make hole for this port in next version of this kit.

You need to power from the DC port on the SATA HAT, not the USB C port.

Should I short-circuit it, as mentioned here (https:// wiki.radxa .com/Rock3/hardware/3a)? Does NAS software uses SPI or flash?

NAS software doesn’t use SPI flash, you can leave it alone. For some what wants to boot from SSD without eMMC, you need to install the bootloader in SPI flash.

barsikus007 · January 11, 2022, 4:25am

I thought that I could transfer data via type-c but I just realised that it’s only accept power…

Could you describe me how to assemble it? With that I could make entry to Penta SATA hat wiki page with rock 3a assembling instructions in text variant.