If I convert VIM3’s M.2 to PCI-E and connect PCI-E card, can I power PCI-E card with 12v?
if you are talking about PCIe risers, you need to use a good quality one with proper power management, and you need to supply power to the device you are powering directly,
what periphery are you attaching to the PCIe ?
The short answer is yes. Your two biggest issues will be finding a pcie to m.2 type m adapter and being able to turn the power supply off at the same time. The best bet for the second part will be to use the win header to power the board from an AT or ATX power supply this will let you have a single on/off switch for the board and external card/ pcie raiser. The other issue your likely to run into is that the VIM 3 already uses a controler chip for it 's pcie lane and you’ll need to enable the pcie m.2 port before your card will be seen by the system. I currently don’t have any links to PCIe m.2 adapters for you. If you do find some if they say NGFF that means it won’t work. If it doesn’t say I’d find one that does say that it’s not compatible with Sata or NGFF m.2 cards.
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Hi @Electr1, I want to attach a USB card.(I have a project using 5 usb2.0 camera)
Hi @wll1rah, I find this m2-mkey to PCIe adapter(description in Chinese) in Shenzhen, which also provides a power supply slot. Could you have a look?
I still confused for power supply. Do you mean that I should cut off power between VIM3 and PCIe card and only use another 12v power supply for PCIe card?
And, in other words, can I feed it with a individual 12v power(also for VIM3) instead of normal desktop power supply?
Thanks!
That M.2 adapter looks like the kind that should work. Though no guarantees.
So the VIM 3/ 3L have the ability to be powered without using the uSB type-c port. The vin port on the board is what you would use for this It’s input voltage range is from 5v -20v. Since your wanting to add an adapter card with your VIM 3/ 3L. I would recommend using this port to power the board and your add-on card along with any drives, potential GPU’s, etc…So you shoudl get an AT or ATX power supply and use that to power all you devices. You’ll want to look on the internet for how to create and ATX bench power supply. Since your not likely to use anywhere near the power that the power supply can put out you can pretty much get any supply that is going to do 200W even if you plan on using a low end GPU. Something like this is the easy way to do it 24 pin ATX bench powersupply adapter
You can do this without that adapter. The lazy way is a having a power supply with a power switch and place a jumper wire onthe green wire ont he atx power supply to any black grounding pin. I generally use the 4/ 8 pin CPU power cable for powering the boards that I can with 12V as it’s already wireed for 12v and any modern supply will have this on it and using an adapter to the port and soldering the wires make it replace for when the power supply dies.
Your card should also plug the rest of the cable from the power supply as need for your devices. I find this easier but I’d just look around and see what you think will work for you just remember for powering things their is no real correct answers as long as you are supplying the right voltages and current needs of your devices.
The other thing to remember as well is that the m.2 slot is only PCIe 2.0 just keep that in mind with expectations of performance.
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When USB2 camera attach to USB3 Hub/Port, this hub/port will downgrade to USB2. If you are interested that, you can refer to drivers - 50 USB webcams in a single computer. Is that really possible? - Super User
Well you are only using 5 and the VIM 3/ 3L does have a USB 3.0 port
Thank for your detail explaination, I will share the result after testing. I appreciate the your usage of ATX power supply, but can I directly power all thing in simple 12v power supply instead of ATX power supply. In principle, here is no different between various power supply to provide 12v in spite of quality. The total power should much lower than 200w and I design this project for users who don’t familiar hardware, I would like to package all parts and keep it simplify.
The real case is: when the USB2 camera attach to USB3 hub and USB3 hub connect to USB3.0 port in VIM3, the whole USB3 bus will downgrade to USB2 bus. USB3 hub now just is expensive USB2hub. In theory, PCIe2 X1 have bandwidth 500MB/s and each USB2 camera use 60MB/s bandwidth. It still make sense.
Yeah you can use a 12v power supply.
On to the USB 3.o pcie card if your device is USB 2.0 it will only run at USB 2.0 the increased power provided by USB 3.0 will allow you to use more USB 2.0 onthe same port. So using the PCIe card won’t help withthe bus speed at all. This is actually one of the draw back for the vim 3 compared to other boards with it only having two usb port and that the the USB 3.0 is a switch between the PCIe nvme m.2 slot in all buses the device that’s the slowest determines the speed of the buss.
You can lmaybe find a USB 2.0 hub with a large backbone that would allow all the devices to run at the full speed of 480 Mbps. I’ll admit that’s likely to be a tall order though as it’s even hard to find that information for network switches.
@wll1rah The M.2 convector + USB PCIe Card do work! Because my USB PCIe Card only required 5v without 12v, whose 5v is isolated with VIM3 in PCIe card, I only need to feed 5v to PCIe. In the future, I plan to a draw a M.2 to PCIe which similar to khadas’s M2X. I prefer compact packaging without extra wire.
The pcie slot only has 12v and 3.3v and a few detection rails on the power side, so i suspect that there is a 12v to 5v buck converter on the card to provide the power, but it won’t hurt to try the 5v first. Worst that can happen is that the card doesn’t power on due to too low power, after which you can try 12v if necessary so as not to blow up the card. Also depending on how much power your pcie device needs, make sure to go with an m.2 to pcie that has the proper cabling and connector as anything else can be a fire risk.
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