Can a fan be temp controlled with Pifi?

General
1

I have a Pi4 with the official Pi4 case. Ventilation wise it’s a poor design. I want to purchase this fan for it which looks to effectively solve the issue. However, I don’t want the fan to run continuously as it’s loud and whiny, but rather temp controlled. Only go on at certain temp and off when temp is lowered. If I were using the Rasp Pi OS, in raspi-config, they have an easy way to set this up. However, since PiIf is using OpenWrt under the hood, how would I accomplish the same thing? I noticed in your amazon description mentions support for cooling fan. Does that mean fan on all the time or is there something in the settings app that would allow me to temp control the fan similar to how it works with RaspPi OS?

…"Out-of-the-box hardware support for USB ethernet adapters, USB drives, cooling fan, physical reset and more. "

Thank you.

2

Raspberry Pi fan that you linked is the one I use with official case.

The fan is not “always-on” on PiFi it should be coming on certain temperatures

When booting up/first install the fan does also turn on

It’s controlled I believe in /boot/config.txt

dtoverlay=gpio-fan,gpiopin=14,temp=80000

So 80°C would be the default for turning on with Pi4 and you can adjust that value, on Pi 5 I think it works like this:

  • At 60°C: The fan turns on at a low speed.
  • At 67.5°C: The fan speed increases.
  • At 75°C: The fan reaches full speed.
3

This is great news! I’ve ordered the fan and should arrive in a week or so. Is this line “dtoverlay=gpio-fan,gpiopin=14,temp=80000” added to config.txt by PiFi when it detects a fan? Thanks

4

It’s already there to turn on at 80 - so if that sounds like the right temp for you, shouldn’t need to do anything!