14 DAY TRIAL // The Raspberry Pi is one very neat piece of hardware that can handle a wide variety of tasks, but when it comes to more demanding processes, it suffers from the same problems as any other computing device.
The Raspberry Pi 3 can overheat as well, but since it does not have a fan, it automatically disables overclocking or even shuts down to prevent hardware damages. This happens whenever the temperature exceeds 85 degrees Celsius, and for a team at Microsoft Research, this was quite a problem.
Working with image recognition and AI models on the Raspberry Pi, the team needed to deal with the overheating problem in the most convenient way, so they created a custom solution to prevent this from happening.
A 5-volt fan from Adafruit is already available, but since it doesn’t directly cool the processor, a custom solution was necessary.
So what they did was design an active cooling device that used the Adafruit Aluminum Heat Sink for the Raspberry Pi 3, the Adafruit Miniature 5V cooling fan, a 3D printed Pi 3 fan mount and two M2.5 x 12 pan head machine screws and nuts.
Cooling fan mounted at an angle
Basically, in Microsoft’s design, the 3D printed fan made it possible for the cooling fan to be positioned at an angle and thus cool directly the processor, which is by far a more effective solution as the graph below shows.
"We've seen quite a few recommendations to cool the Pi using only a heatsink, without a fan. In our experience, using a heatsink without a fan is insufficient. To demonstrate this, we stress tested the Pi by running all four cores at 100% and measured the processor temperature as it heats up,” the team of researchers explain in the tutorial detailed here.
According to the testing, the custom cooling solution keeps the Raspberry Pi 3 at a little over 45 degrees Celsius when all four cores are being used, while in normal conditions, the device would shut down to prevent damage. The typical heatsink solution barely keeps it to 75 degrees Celsius, Microsoft says.
