Cooling the pi with chinese/xiaomi usb stick fans

[PiDerman]

Is cooling with such a fan will have any effect? I am going to overclock my pi for heavy emulation and desktop usage, will such a fan help? I am also having ceramic or Silicon carbide heat sinks as well.

[LTolledo]

care to post some pictures or link?

my head is hurting trying to imagine the thing

[Ernst]

care to post some pictures or link?

my head is hurting trying to imagine the thing

https://www.amazon.co.uk/USB-Laptop-Des ... B0012INYTS

[LTolledo]

Oh... that one, I have the same one.... with the clock function.

Yes it will work in conjunction with the silicon carbide heatsink, though it may look a cumbersome. It will cool the RPi.

and where will this fan of yours be plugged? RPi's USB port or other USB port? Better not RPi's USB port.

I imagine (head still hurts) that the RPi will not be in any protective case as well, is this correct?

[PiDerman]

the fan i am thinking to use is this:
https://i01.appmifile.com/v1/MI_18455B3 ... height=420
I have not purchased any of the items yet.
I will be using this on a simple RPi red or black official case or some other case or might simply use a DIY cardboard case.
I will remove all that blue rubber insulation so that the cord becomes more flexible and easy to fit inside a case.
I've seen that the fan uses around 170mA and the max output from Pi's USB is around 140 mA, So I am going to use a separate usb phone charger to power the fan.
How do you cool down your Pi? how's your fan powered? Can this mi fan be used with GPIO?

[gordon77]

Maybe you can make a drone with 4 of them

[LTolledo]

How do you cool down your Pi? how's your fan powered?

Why not save yourself the trouble and just get a purpose built Raspberry Pi case with fan set. and usually those come with heatsinks. There are a lot in ebay, amazon, or from any of your favorite online shopping sites.

Ok here are something similar to that I have used.

https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Ras ... ry+pi+case

https://www.amazon.com/iUniker-Raspberr ... ry+pi+case

if you dont want a fan then this one will do perfectly.

https://www.amazon.com/Flirc-Raspberry- ... ry+pi+case

[PiDerman]

Actually a mini cpu fan is a lot expensive because of extreme shipping charges(more than the fan itself) in my country. A chinese usb fan is easily availabe in any nearby shop then the cpu fan your recomending, same is with the case as well. That is why I am thinking of trying this fan.

[mahjongg]

Anything that will move air over the heatsink will work.
even this:

[ejolson]

Anything that will move air over the heatsink will work.
even this:

That looks like a nice fan. Where is the USB plug or does it connect through GPIO?

I used an elephant fan to cool my Pi 3B when running benchmarks. This worked well in conjunction with a small heatsink. For similar benchmark runs with the Pi 3B+ I used a hairdryer set to cool mode (sorry no picture this time).

[HawaiianPi]

I've used something like that myself.

ARCTIC Breeze Mini USB Fan with Flexible Neck

USB_fan.jpg (14.28 KiB) Viewed 1834 times

It would work best if the Pi was not in a case, but the setup above did run cooler with the fan than without. That fan in my picture actually moved a surprising amount of air, and made less noise than many small case fans. The fan you posted looks wimpier and may not provide much cooling.

I never liked the noise associated with fans (even quiet ones), and they eventually end up filling your system with dust. So I now use the Flirc Gen2 aluminum alloy heatsink case for my Pi 3B and 3B+ computers. It not only looks cool, it keeps my Pi running cool!

[maximelebled]

If you're going to have very heavy usage, then this kind of fan will certainly help. I have a case with one of those tiny GPIO-powered fans on mine, and while it helps tremendously, it can't run at full load forever. USB fans like these are a lot more powerful though. I recommend pairing them with an adhesive heatsink, where you (carefully) remove the adhesive and use thermal paste instead. The paste made a big difference on mine.

[mahjongg]

Anything that will move air over the heatsink will work.
even this:

That looks like a nice fan. Where is the USB plug or does it connect through GPIO?

Its manual controlled.