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Controllable cooling fan
Controllable Cooling fan

New MessageControllable cooling fan (modified 0 times) Kcmjr
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I've had an idea. I think it's a good one but I'll leave it to everyone else to make the determination on their own. I just installed one of those micro 5v fans in my IO that I got from badflash. I put it in in such a way (sorry no pics just now) that it blows at the Q16 cooling resistor from outside the RF shield just right of the SoDIMM door. It was louder than I expected but no louder than any other PC I own so no big deal.

It occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to control it so if I didn't want to hear the thing I could just shut if off. Here's what I thought. I use an IMOD3 board which comes with an LED for hard disk activity. The new LED effectively replaces the "phone" LED on the IOpener, so the onboard LED is no longer needed and "could" be removed. I found a set of utilities on this board written by various people and noted at:
http://www.linux-hacker.net/cgi-bin/UltraBoard/UltraBoard.pl?Action=ShowPost&Board=verytech&Post=7&Idle=0&Sort=0&Order=Descend&Page=0&Session=

It would be a relatively simple matter to remove this LED and replace it with a transistor switch. Once in place you could use the switch to power one or more fans and turn them on and off by executing the control programs. For that matter if some smart programmer could come up with a temerature monitor it could be made to kick the fans in when thermal thresholds are exceeded. I have not tested this theory, so at this point it's just an idea (my wife doesn't want me constantly monkeying with her IO now that it works good). Looks like I'll need another IO for testing, hello eBay. Anyone have any thoughts?

KCM

08-21-2001 12:41:18

New MessageRE:Controllable cooling fan (modified 0 times) Programmer
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Yup ... it's pretty doable.. Here's the information someone would need to do it..

The IO LED ports
IO port 0x404c bits 0 and 1

The Thermal monitor ports(registers anyway)
SouthBridge (Bus 0 Device 7)
Function 4
Offsets 0x1f 0x20 and 0x21 are the 3 thermal readouts

Basically have your running program read the input every few seconds and depending on the result switch the appropriate led.

.. you'll want to set it up with a hysteresis(sp?) curve so that it doesn't switch off just to switch back on again 1.5s later..

08-29-2001 07:50:57

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