3D print - CPU fan duct (Page 1 of 2)

I love this - it didn't even occur to me to offset the fan like that (I was thinking of putting it all the way over in the peek array, with a heatpipe...)

Too bad the fans I have coming from ebay are 30mm, I'll have to make some mods to this...

Any reason you mounted a fan like that instead of just using a blower that already blows air at 90°? Any idea what kind of losses you have from redirecting the air like that?

I'm mostly asking because I'm curious; I've got some heatpipes on the way I'm planning on using to sink my CPU to my (yet-to-be-fabbed) aluminum case.

Regardless, great work! It's awesome when people do and share these things.

I received the 6.9mm fan today, glued everything together, remounted my heat sink a couple of times, and things are now working fine.

You can see the whole assembly is only about 3mm taller than the heat sink.  it is shorter than the GPBB pins.

Without the fan running, with the CPU idle my CPU temperature is around 45°C.  Then running the CPU at 100% load it only takes about 90 seconds to pass 80°C.  Eventually the CPU temperature was just short of 85°C I powered up the fan, and about 120 seconds later the CPU was down at 61°C, where it has been staying (despite maintaining 100% CPU load) for the last 15 minutes.

With CPU load at 50% the fan is able to hold the temperature at 49°C.

With CPU load at 1% the stable temperature seems to be about 33°C. Which is about 11°C. above ambient.

I think this is going to be a must!

Yesterday my novena turned off while compiling kicad, today I have checked the temperature and it reaches 85ºC easily, I have put a temporary fan, but I will 3d print your mount

My solution is far less elegant:

On the up side, it's been running full-out for the past ~20 minutes, and is sitting at ~53°C.

The heatsink in the picture isn't actually attached to the heatpipe at all- it's just sitting on it, no thermal paste or anything. So it's probably not terribly effective.

And no, this isn't just a hack to keep things cool (though it does work)... I'm planning on using a similar setup when I finish machining my new case. Except then the case (aluminum) will be the heatsink, and I'll actually machine a real bracket to affix the heatpipe to the CPU; drilling holes in a chunk of angled stock was faster for a quick test. Anyway, when that's all done, I think it will be a nice solution (assuming it cools decently). I'm still shooting for passive cooling.

The heatpipes I just ordered from China off of eBay, for what it's worth, and they seem to work well. These are 8mm wide, 3mm tall, and 240mm long. We'll see how well they work once I bend them.

EDIT: I should add that there IS thermal compound between the CPU and the heatpipe.

I chose to get GregRob his fan duct printed by Shapeways by lack of a 3d printer (and lack of time).

It turned out pretty good, so thanks GregRob!

What I would like to know is how the Heirloom fan is being controlled?

I was considering creating something for the gpio-fan driver in the kernel and connecting it all up to the front panel board. But maybe their is already a paved path to get temperature controlled fan on the Novena?

Ok, I connected everything and added a gpio-fan to the device tree and enabled it in the kernel.

    fan {
        compatible = "gpio-fan";
        pinctrl-names = "default";
        pinctrl-0 = <&pinctrl_gpio_fan>;
        gpios = <&gpio3 19 GPIO_ACTIVE_LOW>;
        gpio-fan,speed-map = <0    0
                              3000 1>;
    };

First of all I found that I connected the fan the wrong way in the picture above. Airflow is better the other way.

Second an LED (D14D) on the bottom side turns on when the fan is off and vice versa.

Third there is no use of the gpio-fan as a cooling device yet. Patch seems to be for 4.0:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/1/8/416

Gregrob,

Where did you end up plugging in the fan, and how did you end up enabling it in software?

Job,

I tried looking up how to enable the fan as a device tree, but I am unsure of this. Would you have any documentation I could look at, or would you mind explaining it a little more?

Thank you to both!

That is fine, thank you for the answer! I will need to get the 2 lead pin connector anyways, as this is not long enough for that job. If I do, I will post the results.

I'll need to work on "heirloom" mode some more.  The problem is that I haven't had a machine to work on in a while.

I'll be returning to Singapore in two weeks, and will start working on Novena again.  The next release of the kernel will most definitely have heirloom mode validated and working.

Heres mine:

I ended up using the bottom piece of GregRobs's 3d printed holder, with a 30mm x 6mm blower instead from mouser.  The result looks great and works great.  I do need to modify the 3d printed holder piece to make it longer and accomodate the fan fully as i just roped it into place for now

I'll need to work on "heirloom" mode some more.  The problem is that I haven't had a machine to work on in a while.
I'll be returning to Singapore in two weeks, and will start working on Novena again.  The next release of the kernel will most definitely have heirloom mode validated and working.

Is the novena-heirloom defaulting the max fan speed to 3000rpm?  Apparently this fan is made for max 5000 RPM.