11 ms·

The Raspberry Pi 4 has a fan now – the Case Fan

106 points by geerlingguy 6y ago

tbabej 6y ago
For what it's worth, I resolved my Pi4 overheating issue by expanding the surface area of the heat sink with some folded aluminium foil [1]. Not the prettiest solution, but works just fine. The Pi4s on the picture are running at ~100% CPU utilization of all cores for months (using mlucas) now without any overheating events. [1] https://postimg.cc/CzNzMb6B https://postimg.cc/CzNzMb6B
- jancsika 6y ago
  Ooh, that's very clever! I'm definitely going to give this a shot...
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  Did you glue the aluminum slices to the existing ‘sinks or?
  - tbabej 6y ago
    No, its malleable aluminium foil (I took it from the kitchen), that holds between the teeth of the original sinks merely by pressure of being jammed in.
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      Gotcha. Reminds me of an old story of someone using coins to bridge the gap between a CPU heat sink and the L2 cache chips with good effect.
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  How do you attach it to the chip?
  - tbabej 6y ago
    I have glued on top the classic cheap heat sink [1], which came with the Pi. Once that was determined to be unsuficient, I slotted the aluminium foil (folded to achieve sufficient thickness to stay in place) between the teeth. [1] https://www.buyapi.ca/product/aluminum-heatsink-for-raspberry-pi-4b-3-pack/ https://www.buyapi.ca/product/aluminum-heatsink-for-raspberr...
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  I wonder how well several hex-head bolts superglued to the chip would work... (Or some kinda metallic epoxy, even JB Weld is part iron oxide, but a thin layer of superglue may be sufficiently effective)
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Small aluminum heatsinks are quite cheap. You'll spend more on shipping than on the heatsinks themselves at this volume. I'd sooner do that, unless you really need to pinch every dollar for some reason.
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      I’ve got a bucket of old bolts, but not heat sinks :(
  - undersuit 6y ago
    I swear I saw some guy just stack pennies on the chip and the extra thermal mass did wonders. JB-welding it would only increase the heat transfer compared to air between the coin faces. Or you can specialize and get some thermal epoxy made for permanent effective heat transfer: https://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Silver-Premium-Adhesive-ASTA-7G/dp/B0087X7262/r https://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Silver-Premium-Adhesive-ASTA-7...
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      Looks like US pennies will do a pretty good job (copper plated zinc). With JB Weld you could probably build a set of fins. Most post-2000 Canadian coins are coated steel, meh.
sitzkrieg 6y ago
the lengths people are going to make this awful videocore soc not annoying to use
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  This incredibly cheap, low-energy-consumption soc with an incredible community behind it, yes. Like... yes, the chip is all kinds of weird and messy under the hood, but in practice it works well for people.
  - adrian_b 6y ago
    I have no doubts about the community, which is the main reason why Raspberry Pi is recommended to all people without much experience with such small computers. However "incredibly cheap" is not appropriate when referring to Raspberry Pi. Its price is OK considering its performance, neither cheap nor expensive for what you get. There are a lot of applications for which Raspberry Pi is fast enough, but almost all of those could be implemented using even cheaper microcontroller boards, with prices around $10, but programming those requires more knowledge, so they are less accessible for most people. Besides clones more or less equivalent with Raspberry Pi, there are also a lot of models that are more expensive than Pi, but those are also proportionately faster than Raspberry Pi, so their higher price is justified. I have experimented with Raspberry Pi, but eventually I did not use it for anything, because all my applications happened to be in those 2 categories mentioned above, i.e. either suitable for even cheaper devices or suitable for faster but also more expensive devices. So Raspberry Pi can be a good solution for some people and it has a decent price for its features, but there are a large number of other devices with similar or better power consumption and price/performance ratio.
    - geerlingguy 6y ago
      The barrier to entry with a microcontroller is at least one order of magnitude beyond "I can plug a keyboard and monitor in and type in some basic Python to do whatever I want."
boyadjian 6y ago
A fan is overkill for a Raspberry Pi. A passive cooling is sufficient, and most of all, absolutely quiet. A very good case is the "GeeekPi Argon Neo Aluminium", which I recommend
- 013a 6y ago
  I agree; If an aluminum case were designed to integrate with built-in heatsink, thermals should be improved enough with no downside to noise level. Their decision to opt for plastic in the first party case makes total sense from a manufacturing and cost point of view, but I think a more premium metal case would have also been a nice accessory in addition.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
flowerlad 6y ago
Fans break in a couple of years, so for my home Network Attached Storage I chose Raspberry Pi over a PC because Raspberry Pi is cheap and does not need a fan. I use the Flirc case (mentioned at the bottom of the page) to dissipate any heat the Pi does generate. It seems to work well. I run Samba, MySQL, Docker, Jenkins and so on just fine on my 8GB Pi 4, without needing a fan.
- minot 6y ago
  > Fans break in a couple of years Am I just incredibly lucky or hopelessly unlucky? I have never had a computer (desktop or laptop) last long to have a fan fail. Is fan failure really that common? In just two years? I get why people hate fans. I have a hand me down switch behind my desktop computer and the fans on that thing is louder than the fans on all three of the computer towers that it powers. However, the switch is not made for desktop use and in a 1U chassis, something has to give if we want airflow. However given that space is not an issue, you can get the classic noctua fan and cooler like the NH-D15 and a full ATX case if you're building new and that the fans will probably last over ten years with no servicing. I get that this is probably tremendously overkill but just thinking out loud...
  - kbenson 6y ago
    It probably depends quite a bit on environment. I have multiple pets (2 dogs and 5 cats). Not only does dust build up but hair (dander?) Does as well. Things that also affect it might be whether you open windows a lot or use an internal forced air system with a filter. And of course, how often you end up cleaning the fan and surrounds because of this. I bought a new case for my desktop system about 6 months ago. There has been visible dust buildup around the case inflow fan for a couple months now, and I should probably clean the outside and vacuum out the inside of the case.
  - eulers_secret 6y ago
    I wonder if I’m lucky as well, I’ve had I think 1 fan failure in 25 years of computing. My desktop has 3 80mm fans that are 18 years old and work fine. My switch is 4 years old, my server NUC is 5 years old, my laptop was about that same age, gaming pc has 10 year old fans - all no fan failures! I wonder if it’s environment dependent; I imagine if you live in a dusty or sandy place it could decrease lifetime...
larschdk 6y ago
I got one of those all metal passive cooling cases for the Raspberry Pi 4 off Ali Express and it keeps it at below 50°C idle and maxes out at 65°C with all cores running. No fans necessary.
Zenst 6y ago
You can connect the Voltage connector to the 3V over the 5V and run the fan at a slower speed and less noise. It will ramp into use for longer, but the noise difference is worth it and case of you will certainly not notice it's activity as much. Been nice if they just had the fan and connector attached to a new top for the case and could of added some side vents with height, making things just that much easier overall. I myself have a 3rd party acrylic layer stack affair with a top fan and heat sink with 3V and run it constant as well below whisper level. I'd measure the dB but other systems currently mean my noise floor is 50dB and with sound meter right next to it, I get nothing above that. Though when just that a running, it a faint breeze sound at best.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  Why isn't it PWMed with feedback control?
- nicexe 6y ago
  You can't draw too much current from the 3.3V pin. I don't know what current this fan needs but it is safer to connect to 5V as it has some more room to safely draw current.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    If you run into issues with the 3V3 line, you could take the 5V pin and put a couple 1n4148 or 1n400x diodes in series and drop it in 0.7V increments. The right resistor might do too, you’ll have to figure out the draw on the fan to calculate what works.
- crististm 6y ago
  Microphone for dB measurements should be put 1m away from the noise source. Not at 10cm and not at 5m. That's how the noise level gets defined. I've seen noise levels on cheap indoor air condition units that have unbelievable good figures; only that they measure at 3m; go figure. Smart phones indicated noise levels are irrelevant since they lack calibration. I don't understand why people discuss their figures.
jrockway 6y ago
Interesting to see first party support for this. It is somewhat unfortunate that the official fan lets you read the fan speed, but not set it. I put a Noctua fan on my Pi and it sucks in a surprising amount of dust; mostly an artifact of too much ventilation when the computer doesn't actually need the airflow. (I put a filter on it and it's fine now, but sometimes I wonder whether the dust is actually filtered out, or if it just reduces airflow by so much that you don't suck in any dust to begin with :) While writing this comment, I decided to investigate whether or not speed control is even possible on a 5V fan with 3V3 logic and found this: https://noctua.at/pub/media/wysiwyg/Noctua_PWM_specifications_white_paper.pdf https://noctua.at/pub/media/wysiwyg/Noctua_PWM_specification... The answer is: I still don't know. They say that the PWM voltage is pulled up to "3.3V/5V" internally but the spec says the PWM signal has to be 5V, so I suppose the results are undefined (and they just left 3.3V in their document accidentally). But, a first-party fan could make this work, so I'm kind of sad that they just chose some off-the-shelf fan that was cheap today in Shenzhen. If you could do better than Noctua, then there's value in making it first-party. If you can't, why bother? Everyone that wanted a fan already has one.
- mindslight 6y ago
  IMO I would interpret "External pull-up is not necessary as the signal is pulled up to 3,3V/5V inside the fan." as indicative of expecting to being driven by an open drain output. There also is no spec for "Minimum voltage for logic high". You should be able to test this by hooking the fan up to power, measuring the voltage on its disconnected PWM line, and finding a steady voltage (5v?). I don't know enough about the RPi to know if any PWMs can be configured as open drain and 5v tolerant. If not you'd need to add a single discrete transistor.
- bchanudet 6y ago
  I may have read your post the wrong way, but it seems that they did provide a way? The specifications on the product page [0] mentions it got speed control with PWM, I figured up to the Intel specs, to be able to use an off-the-shelf fan. So if anything you should be able to connect the PWM pin of your Noctua fan to one of the GPIO pins, and use their software to specify the PIN number of your PWM output. What seems more complex is to get the input from the fan about the actual speed, which would be useful to detect that the fan is blocked and is not doing the job you ask it to do. [0]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-case-fan/?resellerType=home https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-case-fan...
egsmi 6y ago
What an interesting year 2020 is. MacBook Air lost its fan and Raspberry Pi found it. Strange times.
skinkestek 6y ago
Now if anyone had a problem to my problem with Raspberry Pi: that it eats through SD cards like nothing else I have owned.
- kbenson 6y ago
  Wouldn't that be a problem with what you're running on the pi and how it uses the card? Or is it not a use thing and it's actually frying the cards somehow?
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    SD cards can die within a few months through repeated power cycling, or writing logs to disk instead of to RAM. There are techniques that one can use to lengthen SD card life, but the average person buying a Pi and slapping a media-center distro on there might not know about them or be willing to e.g. invest in an UPS and use the command line to hack logging.
    - kbenson 6y ago
      Yeah, I know about wear leveling and maximum writes, which is why I mentioned what you rub on the pi. These days anything meant to be a device os that doesn't make allowances for the non-vilatile memory it will likely be running in (even if just the base is and not media mounts) as needed in some way is really doing users a disservice. The power cycling is new to me though. Is that also based on bad defaults (e.g. not using noatime mount option etc.) or is it actually based on power? Because that seems weird given their designed use case (constantly getting and losing power as they go in and out of devices).
    - sjy 6y ago
      I’m an average person buying a Pi and slapping a media centre distro on there with default settings. I’m pretty sure LibreELEC takes care of the logging issue: https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/15079-rpi-logging-to-ram/ https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/15079-rpi-logging-to-ram/
elric 6y ago
As someone who's been obsessed with silent computing for nearly two decades, just looking at the picture of that fan makes my ears hurt. Tiny fans are invariably whiney. The surface area of the blades is barely larger than that of the motor. Running it at 3V instead of 5V will make it move barely any air. The Pi 4 can easily be passively cooled, you just need a slightly bigger heat sink. It pains me to see that they went the quick and dirty way with that crappy little fan. That case has a huge surface area. It's what, ~9x7cm? Passive solutions would have been pretty easy, and probably not much more expensive than the $5 fan. And if you really want a fan, at least get a 50mm fan, so you can spin it slowly and still actually move air.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  Fans are cheaper than the thermostatic equivalent of aluminum or copper. And less over-design required for “rough-service” environments. While inefficient. You could always put some 1n400x diodes in series with your fan and drop 5V down in 0.6V increments. Even cheaper 1n4148s could do as the current is small enough. These days, I really prefer fans because they help cool everything. Bad caps are my nemesis...
- est31 6y ago
  When I went passive on my desktop 4 years ago after having to endure an extremely loud fan, I was constantly surprised at the beginning that one is able to do computing without noticing any sound at all. Now it's become a part of my normal expectations. I run a big workload and it doesn't make any sound. Beautiful.
  - enriquto 6y ago
    Ha! I actually like the noises that the computer makes. They are sort of reassuring. A computer that is always silent regardless of whether it idles or churns a lot of compute, is very creepy. Give me clunky mechanical keyboards and noisy fans!
    - sildur 6y ago
      I miss the sound of the hard drive as an indicator of I/O activity.
chevman 6y ago
I picked up one of these fanless cases, with aluminum heat sink built in, seems to work pretty well - https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  I use these too! The case contacts with the CPU inside via a thermal pad and the entire outside of the case becomes the heatsink. It's a really clever design. Stays cool, no fan.
- justin66 6y ago
  I've been very happy with these as well.
- est31 6y ago
  Do you know of EU delivery options?
  - LeoPanthera 6y ago
    Amazon UK has it, so maybe other Amazons too.
  - slezyr 6y ago
    It's also sold at the aliexpress
  - cantbebothered 6y ago
    https://thepihut.com https://thepihut.com Dunno about the price of delivery You can also check if a reseller of rpie for your coutnry has it from the official cite - https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/?resellerType=home https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/... Just click buy and choose country.
- roel_v 6y ago
  If only they had a version that leaves the gpio pins accessible...
qwerty456127 6y ago
If only it could work without occupying a GPIO pin pair... I use a DVB-T2 TV hat and it doesn't leave any pins spare :-( So I'm going to buy a USB fan, power it from a separate power supply and and glue it to a fan-less case vent holes. This isn't going to look nearly as pretty. What I would like to have is a fan-cooled case with a circuitry which would take a high-power laptop-grade USB-C charger as an input and split that power between the Pi and the fan. Perhaps it could also split the USB-C port into a power input port and an actual extra USB port.
freerobby 6y ago
If anybody wants a fully printable fan mount for a Pi that isn't coupled with a particular case, I designed one as part of an OSS project. The CAD files are available here: https://astroswarm.com/blog/build https://astroswarm.com/blog/build
brundolf 6y ago
Has anybody made use of a Pi as a casual workstation for personal projects? And if so, how does it hold up? The newer models seem on par with low-mid end consumer computers and would be much less of a pain than dealing with a dual-boot on my desktop
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  The Pi 400 has been extremely handy. It's nowhere near as fast as even a low-end new i3, but for things like "Do such and such task on Linux" it's compact and quick to boot.
KirinDave 6y ago
Cool design, but is this novel? Canakit has been doing this for the whole year.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  The thing that's novel is the fact the Pi Foundation finally (tacitly) acknowledged their official Pi 4 case causes CPU throttling.
ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago
What's wrong with the Flirc case, which is an incredible heatsink?
ImprovedSilence 6y ago
Ive run the pimoroni fan for as long as ive had the 4: https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/sandyj/getting-started-with-fan-shim https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/sandyj/getting-started-w.... (And use one of their “cases” too). It only runs when im really crunching along or watching youtube on the tv. And even then it cools down enough to not need it sometimes. With the pi, even setting up the fan turned into an adventure in customized settings to tweak how the fan runs. Not complicated, but enough to grab my interest for a little. Even still, the fan kicks on infrequently enough, and cools down quickly enough, I suspect a heat sink could easily take care of the heat in most cases.
WhoCaresLies 6y ago
A fan is going backward I'm sorry but in today's age, we should build silicon that is efficient enough to handle passive cooling scenarios Oh wait, Apple did it! Why can't raspberry pi do it? i know, they use an inneficient and cheap chinese chip! the way to go to fight global warming -- ok, ok, this is a bit harsh considering the price of the decive, BUT, it still is an important subject!
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > I'm sorry but in today's age, we should build silicon that is efficient enough to handle passive cooling scenarios > Oh wait, Apple did it! > Why can't raspberry pi do it? They...do. The pi 400 is passively cooled.
  - WhoCaresLies 6y ago
    Oh i thought it was the actual PI 4, looks like i got confused here, thanks Using the case as a keyboard, THIS is revolutionary compared to the fan box
blaser-waffle 6y ago
> A little unpleasant, and it has a high pitched whine that reminds of of the sound you get in an unbalanced audio system with a bit of electrical interference. probably no worse than the rest of the home-lab stuff (that sits in a rack) but not so great for something in the living room or elsewhere
yanko 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331969

106 points by geerlingguy 6y ago

For what it's worth, I resolved my Pi4 overheating issue by expanding the surface area of the heat sink with some folded aluminium foil [1]. Not the prettiest solution, but works just fine. The Pi4s on the picture are running at ~100% CPU utilization of all cores for months (using mlucas) now without any overheating events. [1] https://postimg.cc/CzNzMb6B https://postimg.cc/CzNzMb6B

jancsika 6y ago
Ooh, that's very clever! I'm definitely going to give this a shot...
Scoundreller 6y ago
Did you glue the aluminum slices to the existing ‘sinks or?
- tbabej 6y ago
  No, its malleable aluminium foil (I took it from the kitchen), that holds between the teeth of the original sinks merely by pressure of being jammed in.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    Gotcha. Reminds me of an old story of someone using coins to bridge the gap between a CPU heat sink and the L2 cache chips with good effect.
LeoPanthera 6y ago
How do you attach it to the chip?
- tbabej 6y ago
  I have glued on top the classic cheap heat sink [1], which came with the Pi. Once that was determined to be unsuficient, I slotted the aluminium foil (folded to achieve sufficient thickness to stay in place) between the teeth. [1] https://www.buyapi.ca/product/aluminum-heatsink-for-raspberry-pi-4b-3-pack/ https://www.buyapi.ca/product/aluminum-heatsink-for-raspberr...
Scoundreller 6y ago
I wonder how well several hex-head bolts superglued to the chip would work... (Or some kinda metallic epoxy, even JB Weld is part iron oxide, but a thin layer of superglue may be sufficiently effective)
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Small aluminum heatsinks are quite cheap. You'll spend more on shipping than on the heatsinks themselves at this volume. I'd sooner do that, unless you really need to pinch every dollar for some reason.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    I’ve got a bucket of old bolts, but not heat sinks :(
- undersuit 6y ago
  I swear I saw some guy just stack pennies on the chip and the extra thermal mass did wonders. JB-welding it would only increase the heat transfer compared to air between the coin faces. Or you can specialize and get some thermal epoxy made for permanent effective heat transfer: https://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Silver-Premium-Adhesive-ASTA-7G/dp/B0087X7262/r https://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Silver-Premium-Adhesive-ASTA-7...
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    Looks like US pennies will do a pretty good job (copper plated zinc). With JB Weld you could probably build a set of fins. Most post-2000 Canadian coins are coated steel, meh.

sitzkrieg 6y ago

the lengths people are going to make this awful videocore soc not annoying to use

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
This incredibly cheap, low-energy-consumption soc with an incredible community behind it, yes. Like... yes, the chip is all kinds of weird and messy under the hood, but in practice it works well for people.
- adrian_b 6y ago
  I have no doubts about the community, which is the main reason why Raspberry Pi is recommended to all people without much experience with such small computers. However "incredibly cheap" is not appropriate when referring to Raspberry Pi. Its price is OK considering its performance, neither cheap nor expensive for what you get. There are a lot of applications for which Raspberry Pi is fast enough, but almost all of those could be implemented using even cheaper microcontroller boards, with prices around $10, but programming those requires more knowledge, so they are less accessible for most people. Besides clones more or less equivalent with Raspberry Pi, there are also a lot of models that are more expensive than Pi, but those are also proportionately faster than Raspberry Pi, so their higher price is justified. I have experimented with Raspberry Pi, but eventually I did not use it for anything, because all my applications happened to be in those 2 categories mentioned above, i.e. either suitable for even cheaper devices or suitable for faster but also more expensive devices. So Raspberry Pi can be a good solution for some people and it has a decent price for its features, but there are a large number of other devices with similar or better power consumption and price/performance ratio.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    The barrier to entry with a microcontroller is at least one order of magnitude beyond "I can plug a keyboard and monitor in and type in some basic Python to do whatever I want."

boyadjian 6y ago

A fan is overkill for a Raspberry Pi. A passive cooling is sufficient, and most of all, absolutely quiet. A very good case is the "GeeekPi Argon Neo Aluminium", which I recommend

013a 6y ago
I agree; If an aluminum case were designed to integrate with built-in heatsink, thermals should be improved enough with no downside to noise level. Their decision to opt for plastic in the first party case makes total sense from a manufacturing and cost point of view, but I think a more premium metal case would have also been a nice accessory in addition.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

flowerlad 6y ago

Fans break in a couple of years, so for my home Network Attached Storage I chose Raspberry Pi over a PC because Raspberry Pi is cheap and does not need a fan. I use the Flirc case (mentioned at the bottom of the page) to dissipate any heat the Pi does generate. It seems to work well. I run Samba, MySQL, Docker, Jenkins and so on just fine on my 8GB Pi 4, without needing a fan.

minot 6y ago
> Fans break in a couple of years Am I just incredibly lucky or hopelessly unlucky? I have never had a computer (desktop or laptop) last long to have a fan fail. Is fan failure really that common? In just two years? I get why people hate fans. I have a hand me down switch behind my desktop computer and the fans on that thing is louder than the fans on all three of the computer towers that it powers. However, the switch is not made for desktop use and in a 1U chassis, something has to give if we want airflow. However given that space is not an issue, you can get the classic noctua fan and cooler like the NH-D15 and a full ATX case if you're building new and that the fans will probably last over ten years with no servicing. I get that this is probably tremendously overkill but just thinking out loud...
- kbenson 6y ago
  It probably depends quite a bit on environment. I have multiple pets (2 dogs and 5 cats). Not only does dust build up but hair (dander?) Does as well. Things that also affect it might be whether you open windows a lot or use an internal forced air system with a filter. And of course, how often you end up cleaning the fan and surrounds because of this. I bought a new case for my desktop system about 6 months ago. There has been visible dust buildup around the case inflow fan for a couple months now, and I should probably clean the outside and vacuum out the inside of the case.
- eulers_secret 6y ago
  I wonder if I’m lucky as well, I’ve had I think 1 fan failure in 25 years of computing. My desktop has 3 80mm fans that are 18 years old and work fine. My switch is 4 years old, my server NUC is 5 years old, my laptop was about that same age, gaming pc has 10 year old fans - all no fan failures! I wonder if it’s environment dependent; I imagine if you live in a dusty or sandy place it could decrease lifetime...

larschdk 6y ago

I got one of those all metal passive cooling cases for the Raspberry Pi 4 off Ali Express and it keeps it at below 50°C idle and maxes out at 65°C with all cores running. No fans necessary.

Zenst 6y ago

You can connect the Voltage connector to the 3V over the 5V and run the fan at a slower speed and less noise. It will ramp into use for longer, but the noise difference is worth it and case of you will certainly not notice it's activity as much. Been nice if they just had the fan and connector attached to a new top for the case and could of added some side vents with height, making things just that much easier overall. I myself have a 3rd party acrylic layer stack affair with a top fan and heat sink with 3V and run it constant as well below whisper level. I'd measure the dB but other systems currently mean my noise floor is 50dB and with sound meter right next to it, I get nothing above that. Though when just that a running, it a faint breeze sound at best.

IshKebab 6y ago
Why isn't it PWMed with feedback control?
nicexe 6y ago
You can't draw too much current from the 3.3V pin. I don't know what current this fan needs but it is safer to connect to 5V as it has some more room to safely draw current.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  If you run into issues with the 3V3 line, you could take the 5V pin and put a couple 1n4148 or 1n400x diodes in series and drop it in 0.7V increments. The right resistor might do too, you’ll have to figure out the draw on the fan to calculate what works.
crististm 6y ago
Microphone for dB measurements should be put 1m away from the noise source. Not at 10cm and not at 5m. That's how the noise level gets defined. I've seen noise levels on cheap indoor air condition units that have unbelievable good figures; only that they measure at 3m; go figure. Smart phones indicated noise levels are irrelevant since they lack calibration. I don't understand why people discuss their figures.

jrockway 6y ago

Interesting to see first party support for this. It is somewhat unfortunate that the official fan lets you read the fan speed, but not set it. I put a Noctua fan on my Pi and it sucks in a surprising amount of dust; mostly an artifact of too much ventilation when the computer doesn't actually need the airflow. (I put a filter on it and it's fine now, but sometimes I wonder whether the dust is actually filtered out, or if it just reduces airflow by so much that you don't suck in any dust to begin with :) While writing this comment, I decided to investigate whether or not speed control is even possible on a 5V fan with 3V3 logic and found this: https://noctua.at/pub/media/wysiwyg/Noctua_PWM_specifications_white_paper.pdf https://noctua.at/pub/media/wysiwyg/Noctua_PWM_specification... The answer is: I still don't know. They say that the PWM voltage is pulled up to "3.3V/5V" internally but the spec says the PWM signal has to be 5V, so I suppose the results are undefined (and they just left 3.3V in their document accidentally). But, a first-party fan could make this work, so I'm kind of sad that they just chose some off-the-shelf fan that was cheap today in Shenzhen. If you could do better than Noctua, then there's value in making it first-party. If you can't, why bother? Everyone that wanted a fan already has one.

mindslight 6y ago
IMO I would interpret "External pull-up is not necessary as the signal is pulled up to 3,3V/5V inside the fan." as indicative of expecting to being driven by an open drain output. There also is no spec for "Minimum voltage for logic high". You should be able to test this by hooking the fan up to power, measuring the voltage on its disconnected PWM line, and finding a steady voltage (5v?). I don't know enough about the RPi to know if any PWMs can be configured as open drain and 5v tolerant. If not you'd need to add a single discrete transistor.
bchanudet 6y ago
I may have read your post the wrong way, but it seems that they did provide a way? The specifications on the product page [0] mentions it got speed control with PWM, I figured up to the Intel specs, to be able to use an off-the-shelf fan. So if anything you should be able to connect the PWM pin of your Noctua fan to one of the GPIO pins, and use their software to specify the PIN number of your PWM output. What seems more complex is to get the input from the fan about the actual speed, which would be useful to detect that the fan is blocked and is not doing the job you ask it to do. [0]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-case-fan/?resellerType=home https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-case-fan...

egsmi 6y ago

What an interesting year 2020 is. MacBook Air lost its fan and Raspberry Pi found it. Strange times.

skinkestek 6y ago

Now if anyone had a problem to my problem with Raspberry Pi: that it eats through SD cards like nothing else I have owned.

kbenson 6y ago
Wouldn't that be a problem with what you're running on the pi and how it uses the card? Or is it not a use thing and it's actually frying the cards somehow?
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  SD cards can die within a few months through repeated power cycling, or writing logs to disk instead of to RAM. There are techniques that one can use to lengthen SD card life, but the average person buying a Pi and slapping a media-center distro on there might not know about them or be willing to e.g. invest in an UPS and use the command line to hack logging.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    Yeah, I know about wear leveling and maximum writes, which is why I mentioned what you rub on the pi. These days anything meant to be a device os that doesn't make allowances for the non-vilatile memory it will likely be running in (even if just the base is and not media mounts) as needed in some way is really doing users a disservice. The power cycling is new to me though. Is that also based on bad defaults (e.g. not using noatime mount option etc.) or is it actually based on power? Because that seems weird given their designed use case (constantly getting and losing power as they go in and out of devices).
  - sjy 6y ago
    I’m an average person buying a Pi and slapping a media centre distro on there with default settings. I’m pretty sure LibreELEC takes care of the logging issue: https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/15079-rpi-logging-to-ram/ https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/15079-rpi-logging-to-ram/

elric 6y ago

As someone who's been obsessed with silent computing for nearly two decades, just looking at the picture of that fan makes my ears hurt. Tiny fans are invariably whiney. The surface area of the blades is barely larger than that of the motor. Running it at 3V instead of 5V will make it move barely any air. The Pi 4 can easily be passively cooled, you just need a slightly bigger heat sink. It pains me to see that they went the quick and dirty way with that crappy little fan. That case has a huge surface area. It's what, ~9x7cm? Passive solutions would have been pretty easy, and probably not much more expensive than the $5 fan. And if you really want a fan, at least get a 50mm fan, so you can spin it slowly and still actually move air.

Scoundreller 6y ago
Fans are cheaper than the thermostatic equivalent of aluminum or copper. And less over-design required for “rough-service” environments. While inefficient. You could always put some 1n400x diodes in series with your fan and drop 5V down in 0.6V increments. Even cheaper 1n4148s could do as the current is small enough. These days, I really prefer fans because they help cool everything. Bad caps are my nemesis...
est31 6y ago
When I went passive on my desktop 4 years ago after having to endure an extremely loud fan, I was constantly surprised at the beginning that one is able to do computing without noticing any sound at all. Now it's become a part of my normal expectations. I run a big workload and it doesn't make any sound. Beautiful.
- enriquto 6y ago
  Ha! I actually like the noises that the computer makes. They are sort of reassuring. A computer that is always silent regardless of whether it idles or churns a lot of compute, is very creepy. Give me clunky mechanical keyboards and noisy fans!
  - sildur 6y ago
    I miss the sound of the hard drive as an indicator of I/O activity.

chevman 6y ago

I picked up one of these fanless cases, with aluminum heat sink built in, seems to work pretty well - https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case

LeoPanthera 6y ago
I use these too! The case contacts with the CPU inside via a thermal pad and the entire outside of the case becomes the heatsink. It's a really clever design. Stays cool, no fan.
justin66 6y ago
I've been very happy with these as well.
est31 6y ago
Do you know of EU delivery options?
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  Amazon UK has it, so maybe other Amazons too.
- slezyr 6y ago
  It's also sold at the aliexpress
- cantbebothered 6y ago
  https://thepihut.com https://thepihut.com Dunno about the price of delivery You can also check if a reseller of rpie for your coutnry has it from the official cite - https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/?resellerType=home https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/... Just click buy and choose country.
roel_v 6y ago
If only they had a version that leaves the gpio pins accessible...

qwerty456127 6y ago

If only it could work without occupying a GPIO pin pair... I use a DVB-T2 TV hat and it doesn't leave any pins spare :-( So I'm going to buy a USB fan, power it from a separate power supply and and glue it to a fan-less case vent holes. This isn't going to look nearly as pretty. What I would like to have is a fan-cooled case with a circuitry which would take a high-power laptop-grade USB-C charger as an input and split that power between the Pi and the fan. Perhaps it could also split the USB-C port into a power input port and an actual extra USB port.

freerobby 6y ago

If anybody wants a fully printable fan mount for a Pi that isn't coupled with a particular case, I designed one as part of an OSS project. The CAD files are available here: https://astroswarm.com/blog/build https://astroswarm.com/blog/build

brundolf 6y ago

Has anybody made use of a Pi as a casual workstation for personal projects? And if so, how does it hold up? The newer models seem on par with low-mid end consumer computers and would be much less of a pain than dealing with a dual-boot on my desktop

geerlingguy 6y ago
The Pi 400 has been extremely handy. It's nowhere near as fast as even a low-end new i3, but for things like "Do such and such task on Linux" it's compact and quick to boot.

KirinDave 6y ago

Cool design, but is this novel? Canakit has been doing this for the whole year.

geerlingguy 6y ago
The thing that's novel is the fact the Pi Foundation finally (tacitly) acknowledged their official Pi 4 case causes CPU throttling.

ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago

What's wrong with the Flirc case, which is an incredible heatsink?

ImprovedSilence 6y ago

Ive run the pimoroni fan for as long as ive had the 4: https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/sandyj/getting-started-with-fan-shim https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/sandyj/getting-started-w.... (And use one of their “cases” too). It only runs when im really crunching along or watching youtube on the tv. And even then it cools down enough to not need it sometimes. With the pi, even setting up the fan turned into an adventure in customized settings to tweak how the fan runs. Not complicated, but enough to grab my interest for a little. Even still, the fan kicks on infrequently enough, and cools down quickly enough, I suspect a heat sink could easily take care of the heat in most cases.

WhoCaresLies 6y ago

A fan is going backward I'm sorry but in today's age, we should build silicon that is efficient enough to handle passive cooling scenarios Oh wait, Apple did it! Why can't raspberry pi do it? i know, they use an inneficient and cheap chinese chip! the way to go to fight global warming -- ok, ok, this is a bit harsh considering the price of the decive, BUT, it still is an important subject!

dragonwriter 6y ago
> I'm sorry but in today's age, we should build silicon that is efficient enough to handle passive cooling scenarios > Oh wait, Apple did it! > Why can't raspberry pi do it? They...do. The pi 400 is passively cooled.
- WhoCaresLies 6y ago
  Oh i thought it was the actual PI 4, looks like i got confused here, thanks Using the case as a keyboard, THIS is revolutionary compared to the fan box

blaser-waffle 6y ago

> A little unpleasant, and it has a high pitched whine that reminds of of the sound you get in an unbalanced audio system with a bit of electrical interference. probably no worse than the rest of the home-lab stuff (that sits in a rack) but not so great for something in the living room or elsewhere

yanko 6y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331969