Rpi running very hot

I started with a Raspberry 3B (not plus) as the 4B wasn’t available at this time.
It has only the passive heatsinks on it and is mounted into a cheap plastic case.

Pre-Covid times i was able to receive 3.000 aircraft over the day and never had any issues with heating, even not in summer where the temperature in my studio under the roof went up to almost 30°C.
The CPU load is over the day almost the same, independent of the traffic.

I moved then over to Raspberry 4B with my second device, but it is running more than only the feeders. Currently it runs the feeder, the WeeWX weather station and the monitoring of my personal cloud.

In reality the AirSquitter (Radarcape) is a small Orange PI with only 512 MB RAM and it works without issues also in a high frequency area. But it’s not using dump1090 but an optimized self developed decoder software from Jetvision.

Currently here in Germany a 4B with 2GB is cheaper as any other model except the Zero

30°C (ambient) isn’t very hot.
Last summer, my 3b with passive cooling hit 85°C every day until the heatsinks melted their glue and fell off.
This year, I fitted an “armour” case with a 40mm fan direct plus a pair of 24V PAPST 120mm fans (170m³/h each) to ventilate the enclosure).
The big fans kick in when the enclosure temp reaches 35°C.

That really sets the benchmark.
I wouldn’t consider any Pi without an RJ45, so why buy less than a 4b?

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Kudos! Feeders and WeeWX with Belchertown on mine. RBPi rocks! :100:

Well, if you sit there in your home office for several hours, it will become “hot” at some point :slight_smile:

My two other Pi4 do have an active armor case on it. But for both i have disconnected the fans as the temperature even passive is not exceeding 50°C.
The case seem to be pretty efficient on cooling.

I am running my 4B on 5GHz WiFi, works like a charm.

Oh, another one :slight_smile:
I have it working with several feeds to external pages including my own village weather station website. Not using Belchertown there but Wordpress with a Weather Plugin processing the data upload.

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Thanks for the heads-up Jon.

I bought the original solid PCB type some time ago with the intention of drilling/milling some cooling slots in it to aid cooling but bottled it at the last moment with drill in hand! :crazy_face:

Just ordered one of these from Pi-Hut along with the active GPS antenna after checking/confirming first because they are still showing the photo of the earlier HAT with no cooling slots.

Thanks & kind regards,
-=Glyn=-

Without a heatsink/fan when running a core at 100% on my pi4 I was at a constant 70C, putting on one of the small heatsink/double fan combinations available for Pi3 and plugging it into GPIO 5V/GND has cooled the system down to 42C on full load.

Cheers

Steve

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