Are Raspberry Pi 4 cases just too small?

Yeah, I know the USP is a small circuit board is cool, but keeping the actual thing cool with a small poxy fan, while sticking a HAT on top - is calling for a much larger box with a better fan, or buying expensive miniature 30mm fans with questionable run time life.

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Adrian C
Reply to
Adrian Caspersz
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Chris Elvidge 
England
Reply to
Chris Elvidge

It sounds horrible. That case remains a disaster.

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Reply to
A. Dumas

FWIW, the Canakit case with fan using 3.3 volts is inaudible over normal suburban background noise and seems to provide reasonable cooling.

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I bored out the Raspberry logo to admit more inlet air to the fan, the openings in the case seem to provide adequate exhaust to keep the CPU below 70 C even without mounting the provided heatsinks. Right now it's 43 C, running Chromium with 5 tabs open.

HTH,

bob prohaska

Reply to
bob prohaska

So make your own case. There are plenty of DIY cases on the internet. Or buy boxes - Hobby Lobby and Radio Shack are good sources.

Reply to
ray carter

On a sunny day (Wed, 9 Dec 2020 18:56:04 +0000) it happened Adrian Caspersz wrote in :

I have been running my Pi 4 since September last year 24/7 in this case:

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First Pi4 Buster, did not even apply any temperature update... raspi95: /mnt/sda2/security/video # temperature temp=41.0'C

raspi95: /mnt/sda2/security/video # uname -a Linux raspi95 4.19.75-v7l+ #1270 SMP Tue Sep 24 18:51:41 BST 2019 armv7l GNU/Linux

The fan started making noises one day, took it apart and added some vaseline (a lot) on the bearings, very quitet since.

No space for a HAT in this housing, and to change the SDcard you have to take the case apart. Also no WiFi comes out of the metal. But reliable it is. What I like about it is that it is closed so no things can get to the PCB and short it.

My old Pi with HAT in a plastic box without fan is much hotter: root@raspberrypi:~# show-temp temp=47.1'C root@raspberrypi:~# uname -a Linux raspberrypi 3.6.11+ #371 PREEMPT Thu Feb 7 16:31:35 GMT 2013 armv6l GNU/Linux Also on 24/7 since about 2013 Last uptime was 275 days or so.. before I had to move it. Reliable stuff.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

I have a Pi 4 with an extra heatsink in the standard case that the Pi Foundation provide. It's kept in a cupboard of a TV stand, so an enclosed space with just a small hole for cables at the back, along with a Pi 3 and a spinning hard drive, and a couple of USB TV tuners. The Pi 4 runs at 55 deg C and < 5% CPU usage. I did try running Plex server on it, which is fine for SD recordings which are served as-is (.TS file format) but the CPU usage and temperature shoot up if I try playing HD recordings (again, .TS but it needs to transcode). I forget the figures but I think it was about 65-70 deg C and

50% CPU. Shame that Plex clients (eg on our Roku box) can't handle any .TS file (whether SD or HD) that is sent to them: transcoding on-the-fly to another format seems a very clumsy way to do it. I'm tempted to use VLC on the Pi to play recordings, and dispense with Plex altogether - SD and HD play fine with only a small increase in temp and CPU, but I couldn't get any sound, either over HDMI or out of the 3.5 mm analogue socket, last time I tried. For the time being, I'm running Plex server on a Win 7 PC - even that spins its CPU fan very noisily when it's serving an HD recording.
Reply to
NY

There are plenty of cases with 35mm or 40mm fans. I've gone for a 40mm for the Pi 4B, I've used 35mm ones for the Pi 3B/3B+

---druck

Reply to
druck

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