- At least Raspberry Pi 4 makes additional cooling mandatory.
- Most cooling solutions (all but oil?) do not allow stacked HATs (and at least musicians do not accept built-in audio).
This KiCad project suggests a glue-PCB letting coolers and HATs live in peace:
RPi is connected left / HAT connected right / cooler's fan connected to pins in the back as (example pictures are 180°rotated):
Note that the project:
- was created by Kicad 5.1.5 as shipped by Fedora 30
- 's author is not a professional layouter - awaiting PRs/issues - teach me 😁
- was tested with HifiBerry DAC Pro and Flatmax AudioInjector
- IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND!
If you want one:
- drop rpi-cool-hat.kicad_pcb to a supplier of your choice
- if your supplier does not accept Kicad: clone this project, go through gerber and send that to your supplier. To get an idea of how to accomplish it might help to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENmDnoKs2hM
- or visit https://aisler.net/p/IRBRWUAC. Note that the author has no relation to Aisler. It was chosen because their production was considered close at time and place of writing.
Tips:
- Start soldering with J1
- When using Ice Tower Cooler cables are a bit short. To get around: Unmount fan, rotate 90° clockwise and mount again. Be careful not to over-tighten screws!
- For Ice Tower Cooler noise can be reduced significantly by using 3.3V supply on J1 (as written in the handbook). With reduced voltage I never saw CPU temperature rising above 45°
- If space is limited one might want to use a 90° variant of J2: