Active cooling your Raspberry Pi 3

https://microsoft.github.io/ELL/tutorials/Active-cooling-your-Raspberry-Pi-3/

by jonbaer • 9 years ago

134 49 9 years ago

microsoft.github.io

gtm1260• 9 years ago

Hah, interesting/fun that Microsoft would release a guide for something so hacky. There may be some spirit left at that company yet!

laumars7• 9 years ago

"hacky" is the right word. This is one of the poorer guides to installing a Raspberry Pi 3 fan.

The cynic in me also finds it slightly amusing that Microsoft complain about the Pi constantly overheating when it works just fine for the vast majority of other users. Heck, even the gaming community (eg RetroPi) often overclock this thing with little more than a heat sink. I think it just goes to show that there is still a lot of work required to get Windows down to the same footprint as Linux.

Still, at least Microsoft are embracing the Raspberry Pi. :)

GeorgeHahn• 9 years ago

running a compute-intensive AI model

simonbyrne• 9 years ago

What does Windows have to do with it? Their instructions use Raspbian: https://microsoft.github.io/ELL/tutorials/Setting-up-your-Ra...

retSava• 9 years ago

Yeah the mount just leaves it hanging. It will likely be noisy. Why not properly anchor the fan in all four corners? It could still mount to the rpi with two screws.

hunterwerlla• 9 years ago

uh, the post literally has "To measure processor temperature, use the command watch /opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp" in it, that doesn't look like windows to me.

omginternets• 9 years ago

The cynic in me also finds it slightly amusing that Microsoft complain about the Pi constantly overheating

The cynic in me will be monitoring the news to see if MS releases a competitor (FPGA-based?) to the RPi in the near future.

tjoff3• 9 years ago

And yours is one of the poorer reactions to the guide.

"when it works just fine for the vast majority of other users"

The vast majority of other users DO NOT utilize all four cores at 100% for prolonged times.

Also, the very small niche subset that actually do, will in the absolute vast majority of cases not notice the that the PI has reduced the clock frequency in order to remain stable.

The heatsink used is in the article is a quite poor heatsink but even that managed to keep everything in check in these situations.

How on earth does the footprint have anything to do with this? (nevermind that they do run linux) If anything a greater footprint might have suggested poorer utilization which from a hardware and overheating scenario is a positive.

jrs95• 9 years ago

The RetroPi stuff is probably single-threaded. If they were pushing all cores to 100%, they'd probably have issues too.

apetresc• 9 years ago

I think it just goes to show that there is still a lot of work required to get Windows down to the same footprint as Linux.

... huh? They're not running Windows on these Pi's, are they? Nothing in the article indicates that they are, and the fact that they tell you to monitor temperatures with `watch /opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp` strongly implies that they're not.

gravypod2• 9 years ago

What's the lifespan of a poorly cooled Raspberry Pi? How do they hold up long term? Is there any advantage to cooling these things if you're not currently having problems with your setup thermal throttling?

olympus2• 9 years ago

The lifespan is comparable to a cell phone (as in you'll probably break it mechanically before you burn up the CPU). If you're overclocking it and running it hard without cooling, I'd expect it to die after a year. I've never had one break from a cooling problem or any mysterious bricking that might have been cooling. Even when stress testing, they throttle back on their own, and are idiot proof as far as heat goes. The thing that will frustrate you far more is the degraded performance.

And no, if you aren't experiencing throttling, then cooling them isn't giving you any advantages. Marginally prolonging the life of a $35 computer with a $5 fan isn't cost effective- consider that when you have to buy a new one in a few years you will be able to buy more performance for the money or get the same performance for much less. Think about the upgrade from the original Pi to the Pi3, or the cost drop to the Pi zero.

laumars7• 9 years ago

Good write up. I've had half a dozen Pi's since their first release, some overclocked and some not. I've had 2 die on me from power surges during electrical storms but all the others are still going strong.

I've actually had more PC equipment fail on me (hardly surprising given their increased complexity) than Raspberry Pis, so they can be quite resilient little things.

omilu• 9 years ago

>as in you'll probably break it mechanically before you burn up the CPU

It's solid state, there is nothing mechanical to break. I've had two running continuously since 2014. Use a ramdisk. No issues.

frik• 9 years ago

A Samsung smartphone of mine burned up the Qualcomm CPU due to heat. A Windows Mobile PocketPC of mine burned up the Qualcomm CPU due to heat. And I never broke any of my phones mechanically.

KozmoNau7• 9 years ago

I've used a Pi3 in the original enclosure for a while now, running Retropie for various old-school games. Even running it hard with sometimes less-than-optimized emulators, I haven't had any issues.

mycall• 9 years ago

I've had to replace a few on my flybridge in the last few years. I think the next one I should epoxy to weather proof it.

gravypod2• 9 years ago

What is a flybridge?

leowoo91• 9 years ago

Mobile phones don't have fan yet they don't have issues with overheating. Maybe it is the heat that is overrated unless you compute 7/24.

oliwarner• 9 years ago

It's the 40nm process of the BCM2837 SoC in the Raspi3 that really makes it so [comparatively] hot. That's stone-age lithography there.

Modern phone SoCs are not only etched down at "10nm" (FinFET et al, making things seem smaller too), they also get to sink their heat into adjacent and highly conductive components like the screen and battery.

Raspi3 has air on one side, and a [comparatively] thick PCB on the other. Thermally speaking, they're in different worlds.

userbinator• 9 years ago

they also get to sink their heat into adjacent and highly conductive components like the screen and battery.

...and the user's hand. That's a huge amount of thermal mass.

LordKano• 9 years ago

they also get to sink their heat into adjacent and highly conductive components like the screen and battery.

And the screen provides a much larger surface area for both conductive and convective heat transfer than that little IC.

His question is sort of like asking "If my Prius can get 60MPG, why can't your Hummer?"

GuB-42• 9 years ago

They do, it is just that they get throttled before the temperature gets too high. Just look at all the issues with the Snapdragon 810.

vanderZwan• 9 years ago

Mine does get very hot when I Skype, which then often starts to stutter. And putting it on a block of frozen ice (with a plastic bag around it) to cool it fixes that issue too.

MikusR• 9 years ago

They do so have issues with overheating. Thats why they heavily throttle.

agumonkey• 9 years ago

What about a thermocooling slot ?

SeanDav• 9 years ago

"heat sink - heat sink on the processor, fan turned off"

Not a huge criticism, but I am not sure their heatsink test was particularly efficient as all they did was turn off the fan mounted on the heatsink. It seems quite likely that the fan was acting as an insulator and at the very least, impeding heat dissipation.

I may of course be misunderstanding what they actually did.

Xylakant• 9 years ago

if you look at the provided pictures, the fan sits beside the heatsink and not right on top of it. I don't think it would make a major difference either way, it's not blocking the heatsinks airflow.

bipson• 9 years ago

What kind of annoys me about this post is that there are vast numbers of reports from people looking exactly at this issue and going further, even comparing different heatsinks, e.g. [1]. Would have been easy to find.

Oh how great could this world be, if people would do to their research and stop doing for a hundredth time what others already did. They could start from there and build upon if they need to. Or fill the gaps. But nope, let's do it all over again and learn even less if possible.

[1] https://github.com/superjamie/lazyweb/wiki/Raspberry-Pi-Cool...

b3lvedere• 9 years ago

Hmm, this seems more like a specific solution for just this setup.

I've put my Pi 3 in a transparant enclosure and heatsinks on both chips.(Bought it as a kit)

After a few days i noticed it overheats a little when it's really active. While i was researching more silent cooling options i noticed that the bottom part of the enclosure was way hotter than the top part.

I glued four big string beads under the enclosure. It now looks like the smallest transparant table in the world. Problem solved.

ersiees• 9 years ago

This was mentioned slightly already, but still I would like to ask: Why would you use a Raspberry PI or Dev Board to run compute intensive AI tasks on it? Why not use the PC you are working with most of the time, that probably is much faster? And might even have a reasonable ggpu!?

wil421• 9 years ago

Why not? I have a $35 mini computer to play around with. It has a huge community and tons of options that make it easier for beginners.

I plan to make an image recognition system that will be able to count the number of train cars that go past my back yard. Why? Because it’s fun and I can learn a lot about AI and computer vision.

My laptop and desktop won’t be able to survive outside. Plus the Pi can run on battery and be charged by a solar panel. No parts will come close to breaking the bank.

mwexler• 9 years ago

Things make more sense if you look at the top level page: https://microsoft.github.io/ELL/ talks about their embeddable ML libraries, with the focus on allowing some live training on the embeddable, instead of, say, CoreML which (as of this writing) only allows scoring of trained models on the device.

So, showing how this works on a Pi (and where it doesn't quite due to heat) is in scope; I don't think they intended to replace a GPU-based PC training approach.

guhidalg• 9 years ago

Because it's way more fun and interesting to work in a resource constrained environment where your main concern isn't what library du jour you us, but writing code that runs in a reasonable time, doesn't consume unnecessary memory, and meets your requirements.

Active cooling your Raspberry Pi 3

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