Cooling fan connection

Swell6

I'm planning to fit a cooling fan to my OPi PC and would like to know where to draw the 5V power from? Is there an easy connection or does it need a hack? Also, if the standard 5V 2A supply is also used to power a fan, will that impact power available for the main board? Is a higher current PSU needed, say 3A?

crazykill

GPIO pins 2 and 4 are VCC 5v and you can use 6 for GND its close enough.And you dont need higher current psu your fan will not draw more than 40mA. Btw you can also power the board from there if you dont have a barrel plug.

Swell6

Thanks! Sounds easy enough.

bronco

BTW: It's not really necessary to fry your H3 based Orange Pi. There's also no need for a fan. This is a problem of broken hardware initialisation. The H3 is a really energy efficient SoC if you fix the broken settings that are encoded in script.bin

Kortsen

crazykill replied at 2015-12-15 22:40
GPIO pins 2 and 4 are VCC 5v and you can use 6 for GND its close enough.And you dont need higher cur ...

The easiest way is what crazykill suggested.


I did not like that the fan ran whenever there was power to the OPI so I soldered it to the power and ground on the underside of the USB connections and it turns onn and off with the power switch.


Another solution that doesn't need soldering the board is to put a USB plug on the fan and plug it into a USB port.  

It depends on which OS you are running. Some support the power button and some don't. Some support all 3 USB host ports and some only support one. If the power button is not supported then the GPIO is the best way to do it. I am using Beelink X2 Android firmware which supports the power button but only one USB port (2 in total including OTG) so I didn't have a USB port free to plug the fan into.

bronco

Kortsen replied at 2015-12-16 05:29
The easiest way is what crazykill suggested.

The easiest way is to fix the problem instead of implementing workarounds. If you stay with the broken settings in script.bin then all you do is to to compensate wrong hardware initialisation (overvolting) with more hardware (a fan) wasting even more energy.

Isn't it funny that other vendors are able to produce Android devices using the H3 even without a heatsink: http://hometheatrelife.com/trons ... id-pc-for-under-40/

How is this possible? Why do Orange Pi users need a fan? What's wrong with your H3? Is there something wrong with H3? Or is this just the result of broken hardware initialisation?

You will be surprised -- it's really only wrong settings: http://forum.armbian.com/index.p ... ew-of-orange-pi-pc/

Swell6

Fair point, and looks like some good work done by tkaiser.  Anyone know how the modified script.bin file can be implemented on the OPi?

rabu

I am using a fan for heating my room in winter. I guess its from eco brand.

BlackBett

Such fans should not be turned on for a long time. They spoil quickly.

nikolasmick

ohh interesting