I have a Pife on RP4 with official case and official cooling fan. The fan comes on at startup as it should and then turns off once booted up. I noticed the Pifi is running super hot to the touch. Almost burned my fingers touching the metal usb female connectors. I understand the official case is a poor design, but the fan is supposed to mitigate that. I don’t once recall hearing the fan come on to cool things off. The fan makes a whirring sound so I know when it’s on.
Let me know if you need additional details to assist with troubleshooting.
Hi, yes the fan should be coming on if connected on the board and exceeding temps in /boot/config.txt
In /boot/config.txt you’ll see this line: dtoverlay=gpio-fan,gpiopin=14,temp=80000
That means it comes on at 80°C which is a standard throttle range (you may wish to dial this down, 60000 as an example would be 60°C or 70000 would be 70°C which are more conservative and maybe better to keep it cooler), this differs from Pi 5 cooler which ~50°C → Low RPM, ~60°C → Medium RPM and ~70°C+ → Full RPM.
You can tell the temp of your board by running vcgencmd measure_temp - by default fan turns on at 80 but it’s configurable by the value in /boot/cmdline.txt
Also, on cooling, please ensure that the power supply is 5v3a for Pi 4 as lower sometimes causing excess heat too and that ventilation in terms of where the board is placed is reasonable too.