Raspberry Pi 4 Heatsink and Argon40 Fan Case

thingiverse

The Argon40 Pi Fan Hat (Argon Fan Hat for Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 3B, and Raspberry Pi 3B+) is a smart fan for the Raspberry Pi. You can set your own Temperature/fan speed fan curve and it makes for a really quiet setup for desk use. No more 100% fans running off 5V. I use the "Aluminum Alloy Passive Cooling Case Shell for Raspberry Pi 4 Model B" for my Pi 4 but I also wanted reliable cooling for sustained loads and to be able to put it in a protective case. This overcase holds the Pi in the aluminum case, spaces the Argon40 fan hat to where its circuit board doesn't touch the aluminum, and provides access to the reset button, etc. It's held together with four M3x20 screws. I used a 2x20 GPIO extension header to allow the Argon40 to sit just a bit above the aluminum case: (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MXSLFX5). What you want is 13.5mm of spacer with 5.5mm of pins sticking out (give or take). That header lets you remove 2.5mm slip-on spacers as needed to get to the right distances. The Argon40 comes with a thinner sleeve bearing fan that seems pretty good but I swapped it out for a Noctua NF-A4x10 5V, Premium Quiet Fan, 3-Pin, 5V Version (40x40x10mm) for the superior bearing and sound levels. This case is fine with either version - there is just some wasted space above the fan if you stay stock. The Noctua doesn't have the proper connector, though. You can splice the leads or just solder to the back of the stock connector shell on the fan circuit board (what I did) and support with a dab of silicone or hot glue. You also need M3x12 screws for the Noctua fan and the screw heads can't stick up above the frame. The Argon40 uses a daemon you download and install. It's simple but there is a security risk to running it since it has sudo's in it. You can check the script by just downloading it if you want: "curl https://download.argon40.com/argon1.sh > argon1.sh" To do the actual install: "curl https://download.argon40.com/argon1.sh | bash" Note - Thingiverse's formatting breaks the web links out onto their own lines. Those commands are all one line on the command line. The daemon python script is pretty lightweight but they use a 30 second sleep to keep it from running too much. That's probably fine for a case with the thermal mass of the ribbed aluminum one but it is too long if you run it on a bare board. That gets pretty dramatic temperature swings while the daemon sleeps. You can adjust the period in the daemon by just changing the the two time.sleep commands in the /usr/bin/argononed.py file. I changed time.sleep(30) to time.sleep(1) when using for Pi's that aren't in cases. I used time.sleep(10) in this Pi with the aluminum case. The other thing is the daemon doesn't seem to care how many points define your fan curve. Mine has 9 pairs, 40C through 48C, from 10% to 100% fan speed. 40=10 41=15 42=20 43=25 44=35 45=50 46=65 47=80 48=100