Raspberry Pi Cooler

Ever since the Raspberry Pi 4 came out, there has been concern of the CPU and board overheating, and rightly so. After trying many cooling configurations, I finally landed on a cool answer to this hot problem, with great success.

The pictured heat sink armor case is the fan-less version by Geekworm. I believe it may be sold under several other names as well. There is a dual-fan version of this case, but based on personal experience, I would not recommend using it because the fans are junk and the fan wiring prohibits the use of hats on the GPIO pins.

This Argon Artik fan is a very quiet, programmable fan hat set on an extended GPIO so it clears the case nicely. In this configuration, the RPi 4 CPU temps have never gone above 43 degrees Celsius, and the fan speed has not yet run higher than 10%, or at least the 25% LED indicator. I haven't timed the fan cycle, but it's off far more than it's on, which should lead to a nice long fan life. Custom programming provides a scaled response to CPU temperature rise. I programmed this to:

• 43 C, fan on 10%
• 45 C, fan on 25%
• 50 C, fan on 50%
• 55 C, fan on 75%
• 60 C, fan on 100%

As you can see from the photo, a second hat can be mounted nicely on top of the fan using a male/male pin set. Here, a ZUM Radio repeater controller is mounted on top, and the fan works flawlessly cooling the Pi as well as the repeater controller. An RTC or other less-than-full-size hat may be a little awkward, but for the big boards, it's a go.

Raspberry Pi 3 model B+ with the same setup works fan-tastic

How much do I like this setup? I have the same thing on all of my RPi's, and I must say, this makes for one cool Raspberry Pi!

GOTA

updated: 10/05/2020