[Voyage-linux] Re: Any Hardware Voltage Monitoring/Usage Sensors Available for ALIX boards?

[Nick L.]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 7:33 PM, linux123 <24bits at comcast.net> wrote:
> I wanted to thank everyone who responded with this information. It’s a shame
> that there are no software based sensors but I guess at the end of the day
> it would only add additional overhead.
>
> It’s interesting to hear that there would be a 5v regulator of some sort
> just after the DC Input jack. If that's the case then I can see no reason
> why the manual for the board tells you to use between 7-20v MAX.

The Alix boards were designed as a general purpose router/firewall
board. The 18volt spec is because people use Power-over-Ethernet and
thus need to compensate for voltage drops over cat cable.

For the money, the Alix boards are a phenomenal value --especially
when used as a music server. It would be nice if we could somehow get
a small board designed an fabricated just for music server use, e.g.,
no dc-to-dc converters, everything fed via linears, etc. but the cost
per board would go up. There are companies that do this on a small
scale but they're usually built around an ARM cpu.

Nick