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electrolama / zoe

Zigbee and PoE dev kit w/ RTC for Raspberry Pi
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Add connector for fan #3

Open bchris999 opened 4 years ago

bchris999 commented 4 years ago

RPi really needs a cooling fan (especially the 4). My current PoE adapter includes a built in fan, however it would be good to have a connector for a fan on this board. Would be difficult to connect one otherwise as the power (and possible speed control) pins are covered by this hat and therefore wouldn't be possible to connect one. Very excited for this to be available for purchase!

omerk commented 4 years ago

Hey @bchris999, thanks for reaching out. Adding a header for a fan connection is certainly doable, I do wonder about the mechanical fit though as I can't really move the radio or the PoE modules all that much to create space for a fan to fit in. How do you envisage a fan being used when this addon is plugged in?

Raspberry Pi folks have done good work on reducing heat generated since the Pi 4 launched, have you updated your firmware recently? More here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/thermal-testing-raspberry-pi-4/

I've never had issues on the setup that ran all my home automation up until last week (I switched everything over to a zzh prototype), a Pi4 with a zoe on and even when I did stress tests to see how well the PoE module would cope with hours of full (synthetic) load on a Pi4 it wouldn't crash. It got hot and there was thermal throttling but given that the intended use case for this addon is nowhere near the load of the synthethic load tests I am not too concerned about heat and the lack of a fan.

Interested in hearing your use case though, maybe you have a lot more running on the Pi you have?

bchris999 commented 4 years ago

Hi @omerk . Most cases I have seen have the fan built into the case, however I can't speak for how much space would be left for mechanical fit with the Zoe on board. I haven't actually tried running my Pi without a fan (but with heat sinks), I will try that and report back my experience. My specific use case, as I would imagine a lot of peoples will be) is running Home Assistant, but the Pi also runs the addons for DuckDNS, Unifi controller, and a load of others too. Currently I have a USB sticking out the side for Zigbee, so this project would make it into a nice integrated PoE powered box.

One other idea that may be useful is my current PoE hat has a cutout to expose the unused pins from the Pi's 40-pin header (it only drops onto the first 6 and the separate 4 block). Unfortunately it doesn't re-expose power pins for use, otherwise it would be ideal for development work too. Is this something that could be integrated into the Zoe? With this and re-exposed unused pins, a fan could be connected if desired using this. (.e.g. https://quickbutik.imgix.net/7394y/products/5e024bcccd589.jpeg)