With a couple of summer heat waves, I’ve been getting the “anomaly” of high CPU temp on the stats page lately. My Pi is in an attic closet and I’d already pulled the top of the case off with minimal results. So into the scrap box (it’s really a room) and found a 1" 12v fan off of a disk “slider” and a 5v wall wart. Queue the hole saw, soldering iron some heat shrink and a few drops of super glue and about 5 minutes and there’s now a fan in the attached lid to the Pi case.
Results are rather astonishing over about 2 minutes of on time:
Just thought I’d throw it out there for anyone with the same high temperature situation…
That’s a very good result.
Are you using heatsinks? and what is the ambient temp?
I too use 12V fans on 5V (silent and the bearings last forever).
Rather than using a wall-wart, I pull power from pins 4 (5V) + 6 (gnd) of the GPIO header.
I use small old cpu (486) fans, powered 12v from the pc in both RPi’s, one of which has also heatsinks. both RPi’s show temp < 50°C. also being in an attic.
I had to put a fan, with a heatsink on some of mine. They were just getting too hot in the attic and throttling the CPU. You can get a fan for about $10-15. and it connects directly to a couple of GPIO pins.
The Heatsink doesn’t have to be that good, especially with a fan.
The heatsink compound or tape is much more important as it does most of the heat transfer.
Yes on the heatsinks. That was the first thing I tried. I can’t say they made more than a couple of degrees (c) difference before I put the fan on. They’re the cheap ones that come in some of the starter kits. I actually scavenged them from a dead pi I had.
I ran them off of a separate power supply to not pull any extra than I have to from the pi’s supply.
It’s been getting over 90 degrees in the afternoon in area where my receiver lives.
There is an official raspberry pi POE HAT + fan coming out soon.
No word on final pricing or release date.
The rumor is end of summer and cost around 15.
I guess it will also depend on the type of enclosure. I assumed it woul direct airflow directly over the CPU, or is it more likely to suck the air out like a case fan?
Still wondering if it will improve overall cooling or just offsetting the effect of the hat, remembering the pictures people posted here about PoE Pis in small boxes on hot roofs…
