Tag Archives: fan

Recently I bought a fan for raspberry pi. The fan is small, and as I could feel the air outtake was not that strong. If I decide to install this fan, I”ll need to drill in the official raspberry pi case. I started to doubt if all the tempering with the official case worth the effort. I decided to perform a test before tempering with the case. I performed three tests with the same command:

sysbench --num-threads=4 --validate=on --test=threads --thread-yields=40000 --thread-locks=6 run

While performing the test I measured the CPU temperature every 5 seconds with the following python code

import datetime
import pause as pause

file="/sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp"
line=""
output="output.txt"
while (file):
    with open(file,"r") as in_f:
        line=int(in_f.read())
        line=line/1000
    with open(output,"a") as out_f:
        out_f.write("{0},{1}\n".format(datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%H:%M:%S %d/%m/%Y"), line))
    pause.seconds(5)

The first test was with the official raspberry pi case closed, the second test was with the top lid open and the third test was with a lid open and a fan on top of the CPU while I was holding the fan with my hands. Not perfect, but it is what it is.

I arranged the results within a graph with axe Y shows CPU temperature in Celsius, and axe X shows a 5 second tic increments. The results show that with with the lid closed and the lid open the results are fairly close. The difference in graphs (blue and red) exist probably due to a different starting point. The graph shows without any doubt a good boost to temperature handling with a fan (yellow line).

The maximum temperature without a fan in both cases was 81 degrees and with a fan 72 degrees Celsius.

So my conclusion is: if possible, use a fan!

Addition

I tempered with my raspberry pi official case. Added the fan and did a few holes in the case. This is the picture of my crude solution

I added the results with this tempered case to the data from above and the new graph as follows:

Blue – closed lid
Red – opened lid
Orange – opened lid with fan
Green – lid with installed fan

Temperature goes up to maximum of 71 degrees Celsius with the tempered case

Test scenario	Closed lid	Open lid	Open lid with fan	Case with installed fan
Max temperature	81	81	72	71

Conclusion stays the same: Use a fan