Cooler Trigger

A little demonstration

When temperature > deactivation threshold

When temperature < activation threshold

How did I get here?

If you don't want to know the evolution, you can go to Getting Started

I bought my Raspberry Pi and was concerned about heating it. So, I bought a USB cooler to cool the board. However, I would not like to leave it on forever. So, I would need a strategy to turn the cooler on and off

My first strategy

The first idea that came to mind was the use of cron jobs. I would turn the cooler on and off periodically via USB power on and off.

Some like this:

$ crontab -e

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * sudo uhubctl -a 1 -p 2 -l 1-1 -R
5,15,25,35,45,55 * * * * sudo uhubctl -a 0 -p 2 -l 1-1 -R

In my case, every 5 minutes, I turned the USB power on or off.

My current strategy

Currently, the strategy used by me is this application here. The Cooler Trigger monitors the processor temperature (SoC on the raspberry pi) and performs two side effects: activating the usb power when the temperature exceeds the deactivation threshold and deactivating the usb power when the temperature falls below the activation threshold.

According to that article, 85 degrees Celsius should be the limit.

Officially, the Raspberry Pi Foundation recommends that the temperature of your Raspberry Pi device should be below 85 degrees Celsius for it to work properly.

But, I decided to set 65 degrees celsius as the cooler deactivation threshold to increase the card’s lifetime.

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Getting started

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi 3 B
• USB Cooler
• uhubctl
• Node.js / npm
• Git
• Internet :)

Cloning repo and install dependencies

$ git clone https://github.com/gabrielrufino/cooler-trigger
$ cd cooler-trigger
$ npm install

Start Cooler Trigger in background

$ nohup npm start &