Viola Plus power supply for array of 10

Hi,
we recently bought 10 Viola plus with Colibri iMX7 DUAL and rather than buying 10 independent power supplies we were wondering if we can get an advice about a power supply unit for the whole array (with possibility to add more boards in future).
Cheers.

Hi Giuspen,

You could certainly do this, we don’t have any exact power requirements laid out for iMX7D because so much of it depends on what your cpu usage is and what hardware components are being used. That being said, you could refer to this question which has some rough current/voltage measurements of the iMX7, and this question which talks about the viola board.

So for some rough rough rough! measurements, you could assume 250mA for imx7 and 120mA for the viola board for a sum of 370mA total. I would round up and add some buffer to be safe and get about 600mA total. So you could get a 6Amp 5V power supply in order to power 10 of these.

Now again, that is a crude calculation, Ideally you would measure the power output from your application and source your power needs from that, but as long as you have a large enough current supply, you should be good. Additionally, you mentioned looking to expand, so you might just want to grab something like this from amazon?

Does that help?

Hi Ben many thanks!