Received and installed the Pimoroni Raspberry Pi fan SHIM but it was intermittent. After sliding it over the GPIO header pins, the fan was intermittent. gently touch the fan PCB and the fan would turn on. Lift finger off the fan GPIO PCB and the fan would stop. I finally gave up and put the original heatsinks back on the processor. I was really hopeful this would work. I installed this on a Pi4b to help it run cooler, but unfortunately, this is not working as expected. I could have tried to solder the PCB through holes to the GPIO header pins, but that would have made a mess of things if I ever needed to service te whole Pi assembly. Any ideas? I know you can write code to control this, but I thought the fan would just run all the time by default.
If the Fan Shim is making proper contact, the fan should run all the time.
Sounds like the power or one of the grounds isn’t making a good contact.
Fan SHIM at Raspberry Pi GPIO Pinout
One option is to solder a female header onto it. That will raise it up a bit. You could likely put a low profile heatsink on, and use the Fanshim. I’ve done it on one of my Pi’s.
Thanks for the feedback. I soldered the one pin down. Had to be careful to not lay down too much solder since I install a MMDVM Dual Hat on top of this. Put it all back together and fan is still running although it is reading 46 degree. Ran 55 degree when just the heatsinks were installed. Ran 39 degrees when external fan was blowing into the case. Well, 46 degrees is better than 55. Lol. Not sure if just leaving it running vs addining python code is going to have much of an effect on life of fan. I guess I will find out. Regards
RH
I have one of mine driving a slightly bigger case fan, instead of the included fan. I trimmed off the ears for holding the fan. It’s soldered to the GPIO pins. Temps were around the 45c mark, if I remember correctly. Pi 4B in a Smarty Pi V2 case. I installed the daemon, it turns on at 65 and off again at 40. I think those are the settings I used. I’ll double check that next time I boot it up.
EDIT: Just booted it up, with just the Desktop GUI running I’m seeing 43c, and a Green LED on the Fan Shim. Fan is off.
I opened up one of my camera streams in the web browser, its showing 61c and slowly rising, LED is Yellow.
I can confirm, on at 65 off at 40. Fan just turned on while I was typing this.