“Great little fan HAT and quite low profile. I've 3D printed my own case (basic) that allows the extra room for the HAT and it's going well. I thought the (quite tiny) fan would be loud, but it's really not. Good product.”
“This is a great product.
I'm using a Pi 4B for running code benchmarks and it's very important for accuracy that the processor never throttles performance due to temperature. I didn't want to have a fan running permanently, nor one dependant on background software to update the fan speed. The PiCoolFan4 has a independent microcontroller and temperature sensor capable of managing the fan without assitance from the Pi. It works out of the box, but settings like the temperature threshold are configurable over i2c as explained in the detailed downloadable user manual.
You can apparently have the fan just blow air onto the SoC's metal cap, but I installed mine over a heatsink. The plastic body of the standard stacking header is 8mm tall so I used an 8mm tall heatsink and 15mm stand-offs to maintain the recommended 3.5mm distance between the top of the heatsink and the temporature sensor.
My only complaint was that I had to and install Python2 and some Raspbian binaries in order to get the status and firmware upgrade scripts to work. It would be great if the manufacturer could release Python3 versions and remove the hard dependency on vcgencmd.”
“This device is unique and runs well. I like how it has a RTC clock and smart cooling fan on the same board and it fits in most Pi4 cases that can accommodate one HAT. There are a couple areas of improvement that could be made. One is while the threshold temp and the window of degrees of fan speed can be adjusted there is no anticipation feature like every household furnace thermostat. This results in the Pi Cool Fan turning on, then off, then on, then off, then on, then off for a long time when it is near the threshold temp. This is annoying and surely wears out the fan. The device should have a setting that allows it to overshoot the threshold temp by a few degrees so that doesn't do this. It would also be nice to have a little GUI widget that shows what is going on instead of having to leave you command line window open constantly.”
“Unable to set up the RTC even with help from the manufacturer. The fan does come on when the Pi4 gets hot but again unable to see the Status or set low temp.”
