The power stage of a single board computer is the main source of SBC failures. It’s always on, especially for the 24/7 idustrial applications we deal with, frequency of blackouts, sudden on and off occurences more frequent and dangerous than we imagine.

And it’s connected with the external world where spikes, spurges, overvoltages may occour for all sorts of reasons, different from the conductive ones we can manage throught filter or good (and expensive) power supplies.

There are many EMC routes to couple a spike and let it flow to your board, often with important energetic contents, that between the spread bandwith and the energetic contents, may pass through filters or other normal protections and, damage your board.

First be suspicious of affordability of a 5V powered board. This is the classic input voltage for a Pmic (the chip that generates all the voltages necessary for a cpu, that is NOT designed to protect, but to be protected!

So this %V should be very stable ( around 5% on level) and it’s totally unfiltered so any spike , surge, burst will pass thru risking reaching the absolute maximum rating of your Pmic and destroy it, or worse your CPU that is directly connected with the Pmic with variuos traces.

Now consider a 12 V power input, especially when they’re designed for a wide voltage range input (we use 6.5- 16V), because this wide range is hiding the presence of