Hi,
Playing some games today and with no overclock my raspberry pi is overheating after about 15 mins of use. I notice the picade HAT covers all of the chips so cooling with a fan looks almost impossible? How should I go about cooling with this? If I do use a fan should I connect to PWR 5v and GND on the HAT?
Thanks!
You could blow in air from the side, just direct it so it goes between the Pi and the hat. As long as it goes over the heatsink it will provide cooling. A heat sink, even a low profile one will help with this type of setup. As long as it doesn’t touch the under side of the Hat its OK.
Thanks. Tried that tonight and while better, it still overheated. I have heatsinks on the 3 chips and a small fan. I bought a 40 pin socket and pin ribbon cable which I thought would be perfect but get low power warnings when running that!? Is that just because the hat is not directly plugged into the gpio? My next attempt will be a right angle 40 pin socket, and/or a bigger fan. Any other ideas?
Where is the hot air going? Can it exit the case and escape outside? If not heat will still build up in the enclosure.
Would the Pimoroni pin extension gizmo provide enough space for the Pimoroni fan? Would the Pimoroni fan eat up too much juice to allow gaming.
I have read that standard unassisted heatsinks are not effective (ICE TOWER is - but its massive)
So would extending the pins and slipping in the pimoroni RPi4 cooling fan work - any thoughts?
A booster header is recommended on the fan shim page if your going to mount a Hat on top of it.
I don’t own a picade but looking at the pictures, I’m thinking your going to be doing some case mods to get it to work. A new cutout for the USB C power jack etc. The Picade X hat is going to be raised up. You’ll need some more stand offs too.
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Oh yea - power socket will need “moving” - can turn the old one (and a few more hole cuts) into “fan out” :-)
So this seems like a good solution then.
Will the header booster be tall enough for the hat - Im guessing so.
What about the pin usage: “Because Fan SHIM uses pin BCM18 to control the fan, and this pin is also used by I2S audio devices, you won’t be able to use I2S DACs like pHAT DAC, pHAT BEAT, and the IQAudio boards at the same time as Fan SHIM” https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/fan-shim
What about the power - will it be OK to draw power - or will it interfere with the screen’s draw requirements?
All we need now is a working version of retropie!!!
The black plastic part of the booster header is the same dimensions as the stock female Hat header.
Its this one just with longer male pins to plug into your hats female header.
If you don’t install the fan shim software, it won’t touch BCM 18. The fan will just run continuously with no software installed.
That being said, the fan might do some weird things if something else is using BCM 18 though? Youd have to drill out that pad on the fan shim so it doesn’t make contact with the GPIO pin.
I’m currently running my Fan Shim without the software being installed. Fan just runs all the time. My temps are around 40c.
You “should” be fine power wise. I don’t think that fan draws much. And you now have 3A to work with instead of the old 2.5A.
So - it would only be a problem if I run the fan using a daemon that senses temp and only operates the fan if needed. I suspect that this may be the way forward as im pretty sure that all the pins are used - thats a lot of buttons on the Picade! Well 14 and 16 using the power button.
I read that cooling fans draw a surprisingly small current - someone else said that it should work. May just run a small fan and wire it up to USB…
Ill let you know how I get on - at the moment Im using a desk fan - very much overkill!
BCM 18 wise, not installing the software will stop it from messing with something else using that Pin. You may still run into issues with the fan turning on off when that pin is pulled low etc, by something else using it. If you don’t ever press the button on the fan shim it won’t mess with the two pins it uses, wake and button. It only grounds those pins when, and while it’s pressed.
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I seem to remeber somebody actually cutting the circuit board, removing the pads for pins 11, BCM 17 and 12, BCM 18. Fan still ran OK, just always on. And pressing the button will still boot your Pi up if it has power. Thats what grounding GPIO 3 does by default. For me it does anyway.
And a config.txt edit will have it do a proper shutdown for you when pressed when the Pi is running. You just add dtoverlay=gpio-shutdown to the config.txt file.