The Raspberry Pi Foundation has a new product, but this time it is not a new version of their popular Raspberry Pi. What you have just released is an accessory that will help control the temperature of your processor during heavy use. This is the new fan and heat sink for Raspberry Pi.
Active dissipation to improve Raspberry Pi performance
The Raspberry Pi 4, the latest version of this popular development board, improved dramatically in terms of performance. In addition, it included the possibility of opting for models with higher RAM for more demanding uses.
This, which was great news for those who required more power, also implied facing a logical problem: the excess of temperature during long periods of use. As soon as it was launched on the market, many users saw that this new version was warmer than the previous ones. Having a more powerful processor, more RAM, etc., it was a normal thing to happen.
Therefore, although there were already similar solutions on the market to improve the heat dissipation of the key components of the Raspberry Pi, the very foundation behind the project has launched a ventilation kit that is compatible with the official case.
This new kit that costs just $ 5 offers everything you need to control the temperature of the Raspberry Pi 4 when it is used much more intensively and for longer periods of time. So what we have is a heatsink and a fan plus a small transparent plastic accessory that with a slight inclination allows it to expel the hot air from the inside to the outside of the housing.
In this way, one of the few problems that this board has are officially resolved. Although if you need something more or adapted to the needs of your project, you already know that there are other third-party options. Ultimately this fan is just that and connects to the GPIO connector to get the necessary power as any other could.
However, it is interesting that the Raspberry Pi Foundation offers this official option. So that users less initiated in the subject can find in their store or authorized stores everything they need to safely use the Raspberry Pi 4 in any of its RAM variants.
Features and installation of the new fan
You can see that the installation process in the official Raspberry Pi case is very simple. It basically consists of placing the heatsink on the processor thanks to the double-sided adhesive that it incorporates and then the fan with that piece of plastic on the white part of the case.
In this way, as we said before, the heat that is generated inside the case is expelled through the area where the different USB ports offered by the board are located. Likewise, on the Raspberry Pi Foundation website there are all the necessary instructions to activate the use of the fan once the Raspberry Pi operating system has started.