Liquidctl: A first timer's experience

This is pretty much one of the only projects allowing control of Asetek AIO pump/fan combos and unfortunately it’s got a few teething issues:

  1. Unlike the Windows equivalents, changes are not stored in EEPROM on the pump. You’re forced to assign everything at boot each time, which doesn’t work well on triple+ boot systems.

  2. LC_ALL=C causes the script to fail due to the special characters used for drawing the “tree”

  3. pip3 on Ubuntu has to be run in sudo to build and install the special version of hidusb packaged with the PyPi package.

The inability to program to the pump EEPROM is what really irks me, because the fan control is dictated by liquid temperature by default. Not ideal. (Steve of GN even complained about this, but the fact remains that fan speed is tied to liquid temperature)

In default, most pumps run the fans on silent, meaning they won’t ramp up unless liquid temperature gets uncontrollable. Do you trust the pump to self regulate?

I’m just going to connect the fans directly to the CPU header at this point.

5 Likes

ooooo im gonna check this out open razer uses pyusb to control razer stuff i bet this could help on their branded aios

why not build a daemon service to always set those settings at start up
kinda what open razer does to control rgb

I’d have to have an Arduino with this code running to load the profile separate from OS boot, so I’d need it to send those USB commands as soon as the system is powered on, because I don’t always run this on all OSes (Live CDs for instance)

Since the pump ran at full speed all the time by default, it was fan control that was more important, so I connected the fans directly to the CPU fan header.

1 Like

Why would you want it set as something else? if the liquid is cool, doesn’t it make sense to keep the fans low?

Less heatsoaking happens when the fans are tied to CPU load. More heatsoaking isn’t ideal as the tubes permeate faster with hotter liquid temperature.