Raspberry Pi 4+

Hardware
81

But I think I will not buy a Pi 4 any time soon, no real need except my curiosity. :laughing:

My Pi 3 is doing just fine. It's strapped to the back of an Iiyama touchscreen and displaying my Dashboard. Running quite constantly at about 60Ā°C and with acceptable performance.

2 Likes
82

Reinstalled my Pi4 earlier, with the pimoroni heatsink case (the one without the fans). Havenā€™t reached the 50C yet, not under heavy load either (multi core compiling). Now for the fun to start, setting up the flows to connect everything together...

83

I don't think much stress would be involved as you are holding the temp at a fairly constant level. However having the fan on all the time is an easy "set and forget" solution. The power consumption on those small fans is minuscule.

If you do roll your own intelligent fan solution just ensure you have the proper passive component protections in place (diode, resistor etc).

84

You shouldn't need any, as just about all small cooling fans are Brushless DC fans (BLDC), which have internal circuitry to drive the motors, so any Flyback issues will be dealt with by that circuitry.

85

When I said intelligent I meant if you wish to control fan speed and/or switching from a gpio pin.

If you just wish to have one running all the time, as you say, you shouldn't need anything else.

86

If the motor is BLDC, I still don't see the need for flyback diodes etc, even if intelligently driven.
What do you see as the issue?

87

A common way to control the fan ... https://www.instructables.com/id/PWM-Regulated-Fan-Based-on-CPU-Temperature-for-Ras/

88

When the parts arrive from china, I'll write up my 'node-RED' version :wink:

2 Likes
89

To me its better to just run the fan all the time, you get used to it when its on all the time unless its a really noisy fan. Turning it on an off is more noticeable to me. YMMV.

Same with the central A/C in the house, newer "proportional" units try to match the A/C compressor output to the heat "leaking in" which means its most always on during the summer, but is a much less objectionable "background sound" compared to a bang-bang compressor controller kicking on and off every 20-30 minutes.

90

Only a quantum refrigerator would be better :slight_smile:

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91

Iā€™ve only one big (fan sized) question: why? What are you running on a pi that you would need a 40C drop in cooling?

1 Like
92

Exactly the point of my ironic post Lena :slight_smile:
Will there be cautionary stickers warning about possible frostbite?

93

It looks cool :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

94

Oh my... :see_no_evil:

95

My initial worries of burning myself on the heatsink case didn't come true. But I've found a different problem now, quite unexpected yet somehow completely not. The cats love sitting on it because it's warm, blocking the wifi antenna and as I mostly use them over wifi the system goes out of reach when they sit there. Because why sit on a laptop keyboard when you can sit on a Pi 4 instead? :stuck_out_tongue:

6 Likes
96

For anyone interested nodesource now has support for Ubuntu 19.10

1 Like
97

Definitely good to hear means I can replace my sketchy solution

98

it got a lot of interest, so for anyone who has not followed recent developments, the Raspberry Pi folks have made a bunch of firmware upgrades that let the Pi 4 run a lot cooler.

To me, the most interesting part of the post is at the end, where they get a big improvement by standing the board (no case) on its side to improve air flow. They do not mention other orientations or raising the edge of the board above the desk top, so when I get time I'll try some experiments using the DIN rail mounting plates I have attached to a couple of older Pi's. Perhaps the best argument that the Pi 4 has achieved desktop computer status is that it needs thermal management. :slightly_smiling_face:

7 Likes
99

(Maybe not the best point to interject but.....)

Have you see this:

Passive heat sink on RPI

101

Hi,
I know this is off-topic - just wanted some useful feedback from the forum members.

I've just ordered another RPi-4B this time with 4GB of RAM.

My intention is to dedicate it to my home-banking and financial stuff as my main PC runs Windows-7 (which is no longer supported). I did think about buying Windows-10 for my PC but thought the Raspberry Pi route might be better, more "fun" and more secure (???).

First question... should I install 'buster' or 'ubuntu' (Mate desktop) on the RPi-4B??
Second question... are the above operating systems secure enough for home-banking??

Any inputs would be appreciated.