PineA64 Cooling Fan and Initial Thoughts Post

[MarkHaysHarris777]

   

My 5v fan is plugged into the Sparkfun breakout board, along with my LED lab project (binary I/O for my robot). I have the fan mounted on free-standing rubber mounts offset from the standard SoC heatsink by about 4-5 mm. 

I am pleased with both the debian and ubuntu gnu+linux loads; I have the RPi.GPIO-PineA64 stuff from git-hub working on both, and (obviously) have the gcc compiler working on both. 

I struggled a bit (like everyone else) with debian not supporting the 1920x1080 hdmi LG monitor;  not to worry, just edit the /boot/uEnv.txt  file and change the 720p60 to 1080p60 and reboot-- voila !


The fan is fairly quiet, and very efficient. I'm using a logitech keyboard|trackpad combo (K400r) with an LG 1920x1080 LED monitor ;  and, I'm using the PineA64 as my primary desk PC for the month ! So far, its been fantastic !  Nice work everyone !

marcus

[Luke]

Great to hear, and such as neat setup you got there! Nice cable management

[janeku]

Interesting,
I also planned to mount either heat sink or heat sink with fan.
Because I will receive (I suppose) ABS or Acrylic case, i plan to install fan on it, drilling small holes for stream of air from cooler to CPU.
Is it more safe to pull out voltage from PIN's or direct to power it from external power device ?
What is grey wire comming out from breakout board and goes to Pine board ? Thermal sensor or else ?
I am not total amateur with electronics but any help is good in making this small project of mine (when time comes, of course).
Regards,

[xalius]

Interesting,
I also planned to mount either heat sink or heat sink with fan.
Because I will receive (I suppose) ABS or Acrylic case, i plan to install fan on it, drilling small holes for stream of air from cooler to CPU.
Is it more safe to pull out voltage from PIN's or direct to power it from external power device ?
What is grey wire comming out from breakout board and goes to Pine board ? Thermal sensor or else ?
I am not total amateur with electronics but any help is good in making this small project of mine (when time comes, of course).
Regards,

Hi, you should be able to supply a fan from the board with 5V for example if it fits the overall power budget and doesnt inject interference back into the board's supply rail (fans have pwm controllers built in that can cause issues sometimes).  The grey wire coming from your breakout is the Wifi/BT patch antenna. You want to mount the end of it as far away from the board as possible and metal objects. If you dont like that antenna, you can look for other 2.4Ghz Wifi/BT antennas with U.FL connectors (they are used in most mobile devices...). Do not operate the wifi module without antenna attached since that can damage the RF amplifiers if the AGC is slow to reduce TX power...

[MarkHaysHarris777]

@Luke- thanks!

@janeku- my fan is only 140ma... if it needed 500ma I'd power it external. I have lots of other RPi units and they all have fans... have never had a problem powering the fan from the on-board 5v... but I choose fans carefully. All of my other units have cases. Two of them use a side-fan (squirrel wheel fan designed for netbooks (very tiny). With this fan I can keep the temps @ about 40c; unless I drive the SoC hard...
The grey wire coming off the daughter card is the wifi antenna. The black wire coming off the Sparkfun breakout board is the LED lab ground. I'm using the SoC thermometer :

/sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp