Fan controllers are kind of expensive, the ones I can find are like $100 and are only programmable with Windows software, and shouldn’t be really (in my opinion) so I started thinking about this idea this morning and after a couple of revisions this is what I’ve come up with (yet).
An extender board for a Raspberry Pi Zero that pulls power from a sata power cable and runs and controlls a bunch of fans. Pi Zeros are pretty cheap, available, and the software is easily updated and no time is needed to develop that part of the hardware. There’s servo controller boards that are less than $10 so that part should also be pretty cheap. Make it open hardware and there will be tons of them on AliExpress in a couple of weeks.
Either you add a couple of temperature monitors on cables, or if you’re lazy you just add one, or, read the input from a fan on the motherboard and match all the fans to that. Every fan should also be individually configurable so one can be 100% of input, and another only 50%. If you have a computer with different zones were some don’t need to be as much fanned as the others.
Connect the Pi Zero to an internal usb port that drives the Pi Zero, and you can communicate with it to update software and so on.
I lack the energy and knowledge to make this but if someone makes one I’ll buy a couple
Any of the Pi’s have loads of computing power. Even an ATMega32A is kind of “high end” for a mere fan controller.
The advantage of using something like an Arduino Micro would be the analog input channels for temp-sensing.
Will give this a strong think should I find myself bored one evening
Note for people giving this a shot:
The Fans pull their PWM line up to 5V. To tell the fan how fast to go, pull that PWM line down to 0V (via resistor, from memory 1k Ohm).
Not a hat/controller board, but a multi fan controller that is controlled from the cpu fan.
You plug in a cable from the cpu fan on the motherboard to the controller card, and then put the cable to the cpu fan in the red connector. The rest will control any fans you have, but with the same speed on all of the fans. Takes power from sata or molex.
It would be awfully & instantly more useful by adding one (or more) RED plug(s) to receive input(s) from GPU fan(s). Add a simple logics to output Max(cpu fan, gpu fan(s)).
ASUS didn’t do it perhaps because their motherboard BIOS can provide synergy between GPU/CPU/case fans.
Yeah. A big downside with China stuff like this is that it can be really hard to track down the original developer/factory that build the items if you want to ask for improvements like that. It’s usually easier to find another factory and ask them “Can you build this product but with these changes?”
The Aquacomputer Quadro and Octo only have Windows software, but the microcontroller stores settings, so you only need to run the software once to configure it, after that it just needs power. I’ve been using them for a while, pretty good devices, you can just stick them somewhere convenient with double sided tape. Just also get a thermistor, or it won’t be able to control speed based on temperature.
Easy enough to snapshot your Windows VM’s volume, plug the fan controller in, pass it through to the VM, install the software, set the fan curves, halt the VM, and roll back the volume to before you installed the fan controller software.
