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Noctua releases official 3D CAD models for its cooling fans
- embedding-shape 6mo agoTweet with image: https://x.com/Noctua_at/status/2048688184314273947 https://x.com/Noctua_at/status/2048688184314273947 Example download: https://www.noctua.at/en/support/downloads?product=nf-a12x25-pwm https://www.noctua.at/en/support/downloads?product=nf-a12x25...
- egeozcan 6mo ago> To protect our intellectual property, certain features – such as fan impeller geometries – have been slightly modified while remaining visually very close to the actual product. Noob question: If someone wants to copy their design with no respect to their intellectual property, can't they just 3D scan?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- zbrozek 6mo agoYes, though the fidelity offered by faithful CAD would be both easier to interpret correctly and might even hint at the CAD feature tree. Kudos to them for releasing models useful for integration.
- egeozcan 6mo agoYes, by no means did I comment to take away from the great service they are doing to the builders. I'm a Noctua fan! I was just curious.
- ForOldHack 6mo agoFrom what I remember from my NASA friend, a few companies, hired a few fluid flow engineers, during the defense bust, and designed fan blades that remarkably increased air flow. ( think profiles like air plane wing ). Something happened and in a few years, there were good fans, and there were great fans. I happen to own a pair of Noctura fans, and wow! They are great, so I would assume that some heavy lifting was done in fluid flow.
- thfuran 6mo agoIt better have been, considering what they charge and how long they take to come out with new ones.
- fecal_henge 6mo agoI would think so, or by taking cross sections. Its hard to believe they have some miraculous geometry that needs guarding anyway. Maybe they are trying to dissuade people who might try to 3d print an impeller. 3d models for industrial fan manufacturers (Sanyo,NMB) are widely available.
- quanto 6mo agoThere could be geometrically tiny optimizations that lead to an outsized impact in noise and flow by turbulence reduction. While optimizing an impeller with computational FSI (fluid structure interaction) is not as hard as before, it still is not trivial. And it's these (perhaps small) optimizations that justify Noctua being 5x more expensive than generic black fan.
- fyrn_ 6mo agoI believe the tolerances to the fan housing (which reduces turbulence and thus noise), and the the material stiffness needed for that small tolerance, are the alleged reason there are few copycats. Supposedly getting plastic that rigid is hard. I've tried to find hard numbers and validate that claim, but I wasn't able to. Would probably have to measure an actual noctua fan blade to know. On the other hand, metal printing is attainable now..
- HPsquared 6mo agoDo they add glass fibers, I wonder. That's a way to make plastic stiffer but it's a bit harder to make.
- alex43578 6mo agoHopefully not - I’d hate the idea of my fan shedding glass fibers right into the exhaust of my PC and onwards into my office.
- AlotOfReading 6mo ago
- userbinator 6mo agoUnless they still have an unexpired patent on the design, it's completely legal to clone. Physical objects simply do not have the same type of copyright protection, and there is considerable precedent in making compatible components --- the most notable example being the automotive aftermarket.
- taskforcegemini 6mo agojust make sure there aren't any rounded corners
- unixhero 6mo agoBut can I clone my lover?
- jijijijij 6mo agoI believe the restriction on personal replication of patented designs is a US thing (only?). At least in Germany, you are legally allowed to make patented things for yourself or science to some capacity. The whole point of a patent is encouraging progress through disclosure of knowledge. The US restriction is quite mad, if you think about it. Freedom my ass.
- bbor 6mo agoThe whole point of a patent is encouraging progress through disclosure of knowledge. Is it, though? It seems like the purpose of a patent is pretty direct: make money for people(/corporations...) who invent things. I guess you could argue that inventors would hide their designs without patents, but that's not how any industry I'm familiar with works; if they thought that obscurity was an option, they'd stick with it and just label it a trade secret!
- 0-_-0 6mo agoObscurity makes no sense on a world with patents.
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- whazor 6mo agoWouldn't there be too much error when you both 3D scan and 3D print it?
- ForOldHack 6mo agoMy guess is that both 3D printed fans and production fans get balanced, but the production fans have an extra bit of design, that makes the profile sail at both a wider speed range, and peaks at a higher speed.
- PunchyHamster 6mo agoyou'd probably have to do a bit of fixing on a model to get close
- dgellow 6mo agoThe 3d scan is generally used as a base for your cad model, you don’t print it it directly, you instead replicate the shapes in your cad software, that gives you pretty much infinite precision thanks to NURBS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-uniform_rational_B-spline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-uniform_rational_B-spline
- kelnos 6mo agoUnless they have patents on their fan impleller geomeries, the IP they're referring to is likely just trade secrets. Trade secrets do have legal protections in the US, but those protections are mainly about disclosing or stealing those secrets, not about physically inspecting something and deriving the trade secret that way. Not sure about the tech aspect of 3D scanning or if that would be accurate enough; I don't have any experience there to draw on.
- nkrisc 6mo agoIf your goal is to reproduce it you could just make a cast of the fan and then use that to make a mold. It’d be a bit tricky since you wouldn’t really have a convenient spot for a planar parting line, but should be possible.
- Koffiepoeder 6mo agoAlso this would not account for cooling shrinkage, a very annoying problem when making high quality parts to spec.
- numpad0 6mo agoI think they are trying to stop random small shops from making cosmetic copies that compete with their products. Crude copies with convincing appearance would tarnish their brand. Visibly crude copies stop performance data of such copies from being mistaken as representative of actual products.
- dgellow 6mo agoYou really don’t need to 3d scan, I’m not a cad expert and it took me just a few evenings to replicate pretty much the blade profile of my Noctua fans based on photos
- echoangle 6mo agoAnd how do you now how accurate that is? If you did it based on photos, I seriously doubt that the model is accurate to millimeters at every point of the surface.
- Moto7451 6mo agoThermaltake already makes a clone: https://www.tomshardware.com/features/noctua-nf-a12x25-vs-toughfan-120 https://www.tomshardware.com/features/noctua-nf-a12x25-vs-to... Noctua seems fine so long as you’re not copying the color scheme and branding. Interestingly TT had a 140mm version before Noctua. Noctua seems happy being the premium option.
- rasz 6mo agoNoctua is a clone to begin with https://www.hwcooling.net/en/nidec-servo-gentle-typhoon-d1225c-wont-lose-to-just-any-fan-test/ https://www.hwcooling.net/en/nidec-servo-gentle-typhoon-d122...
- colechristensen 6mo agoA copy-of-a-copy can lose a lot of detail. If you're good, people are going to clone you, but you might as well not do their work for them and filter out at least the lowest effort clones. Given the profit margins of a lot of these things the effort and skill required could make the whole cloning venture not worth it.
- m3kw9 6mo agoso it's pretty useless if they just say it's their design, but not really.
- rasz 6mo agoWhy not scan the original fan Noctua ripped off then? Nidec Servo Gentle Typhoon
- userbinator 6mo agoI have one of those and can attest to its quietness, as well as reliability --- it's almost 2 decades old and still working well with no sound, just needs an occasional cleaning. Takes almost 30 seconds to coast to a stop!
- kernalix7 6mo agoWould have saved me time on a 3D printer I designed a while back. I integrated Noctua fans and ended up measuring mounting dimensions by hand. Having the official CAD models would have made fan integration a lot cleaner.
- userbinator 6mo agoAren't their dimensions standard? Many people replace other fans with Noctua's, after all.
- kernalix7 6mo agoThe fan body itself follows standard 120/140mm dimensions, but I needed the smaller details for my design, the rubber dampers, anti-vibration corners, cable routing clips. Those don't show up cleanly in the datasheet, so I ended up using a caliper. That's the part the official CAD would have helped most with.
- Arch-TK 6mo agoYou're better off for having done the measurements. Broadly, it is just good training since you're normally _not_ going to have CAD drawings. If you do this enough, it becomes second nature, and with a 3D printer it's fast to make test prints which you can use to check your measurements against. More specifically, it avoids having to wonder if you'd be breaching some law by using those CAD drawings to make a "derivative work". While there's nothing illegal about using precise tools to measure an existing product and create a CAD model. It's (apparently) a silly grey area to take measurements from a CAD representation of a product to make your own CAD model. It can be argued that you're just taking factual information from a reference and using it to produce your own design. But whenever you find yourself saying to yourself that something "can be argued" then you really need to take pause to consider if you want to find that out for yourself or avoid the problem entirely. This is the same absurd nonsense that Prusa's "Open" Community License imposes. If I buy a Prusa 3D printer and I just carefully measure it (I don't find this that hard, and I am at best an amateur, consider what an experienced CAD designer could achieve with the right tools), I can create a 3D model of the printer and, as long as I've omitted any separable purely aesthetic elements, I own all rights to that 3D model. Moreover, as long as there are no patents on the product, I can manufacture and sell it. The hard part of cloning a product like a 3D printer or silent fan is not in getting the exact CAD model, it's in the choice and sourcing of materials, making the right tooling, finding places to make all the parts, etc. There are also some secrets on how certain things are manufactured. But those either don't appear in the CAD model or can be easily omitted. If manufacturers want to hand out CAD models of their products, they should do so under some highly permissive license, with only enough detail to actually aid in producing mods. The alternative where the license is restrictive, is that you're just giving out poisoned apples that solely restrict the freedoms of anyone who decides to take them.
- jasiek 6mo agoMikrotik does this for some of their parts as well
- kernalix7 6mo agoGood to know, didn't realize Mikrotik did this too. Useful for homelab planning where rack space and airflow actually matter.
- fy20 6mo agoHow much more is the BOM for a silent fan like in Noctua? I recently bought a controller for my well water pump, and it has two 80mm fans for cooling. Sounds like an aircraft when taking off and doesn't seem to move much air. I'm planning to replace them with Noctua fans.
- Mashimo 6mo agoProbably best to look up the local prices yourself? We don't know where you live. There are fans that are cheaper that come close to noctua, but noctua are one of the best fans you can buy.
- KeplerBoy 6mo agoWell the cheapest crap fans are almost free, Noctua fans are certainly not free. So the added cost is the entire price of a Noctua fan.
- throwaway85825 6mo agoYou're not going to find a significantly quieter 80mm fan. It needs to be bigger so the blade passing frequency is in a less noticeable range.
- srott 6mo agoThere is Fan Show Down on yt where people are trying to beat the original Noctua fan design: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHLn2U7i45M_EXIsnqUyI-nqCCk-wfCU9 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHLn2U7i45M_EXIsnqUyI...
- zozbot234 6mo agoI'm disappointed that this is on YT, shouldn't it be on OnlyFans?
- stavros 6mo agoOnlyFans lost its purported audience years ago, when they made the decision to include human adult content in addition to fan-related content only. The adult content quickly took over and now you can barely find anything relating to fans on there. Reddit is a much better place for that now, and if you aren't particularly precious about documentary-style fact reporting, you're much better off browsing r/fanfiction.
- DaSHacka 6mo agohaha true, though I don't think that's what GP meant
- pdpi 6mo ago> you're much better off browsing r/fanfiction. The punchline is buried a little bit too deep, but pretty sure they're just playing along.
- wongarsu 6mo agoI thought "when they made the decision to include human adult content in addition to fan-related content" in the first sentence was already pretty obvious
- cheschire 6mo ago
- swiftcoder 6mo agoThe Fan Showdown YouTube guy is going to have a field day
- russelg 6mo agoEspecially because they previously denied his request for the files (even when they've sponsored him), stating the same IP issue.
- pylotlight 6mo agorepost??
- caldis_chen 6mo agoonly fans?
- sylware 6mo ago"Vercel Security Checkpoint" "enable javascript to continue" Bugger...
- emsign 6mo agoMeanwhile 3D printing is being banned in US states supposedly to prevent people from creating gun parts, because just buying a gun in the US isn't doable for a criminal. But in reality it's because ownership of production and machines is about to get banned for the lower classes.
- throwaway85825 6mo agoNot just 3d printing, the proposed law applies to cnc too.
- HDBaseT 6mo agoYou will not be able to make anything and you will be happy.
- richwater 6mo agorecent scotus decision will make that much harder (not that lawmakers respect judicial decisions. but most firearm bills are overturned anyway).
- dgellow 6mo agoThat’s so neat! I will be able to compare to my own CAD models from when I 3d printed my PC :D
- Michael666 6mo ago[flagged]
- mghackerlady 6mo agoNoctua stays winning