Help with my power supply
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My current game system (RPi3) uses a 12v 120mm fan for cooling, which does wonders for keeping the system cool...
Is there a way to have my fan shut off when the Pi is shutdown?
Tried looking into GPIO solutions, but nothing seems to work because of it being a 12v fan
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@drakaen391 You need to supply way more detail. Are you using a separate power supply for the fan? There are many ways to do this for example use GPIO to a simple microcontroller that could be used to drive the fan - does it have to be 12V? Why not get a fan that works off 5V and power it from the GPIO?
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Currently the fan is powered by a 120vac to 12vdc transformer separately.
I don’t currently have a 5v fan big enough, which would be useful, but the 5v fan couldn’t keep it cool enough for the CPU intensity...
I’ll take a picture of the current setup to give an idea of it
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@drakaen391 You could setup a relay, something like an opto-coupler solid-state relay that you trigger with GPIO during startup/shutdown. The relay could in turn switch off the 12v power.
I am thinking of a component that is normally open, at boot, you set your GPIO to HIGH, which triggers the relay switch on the fan. When the Pi shuts down, the GPIO that was high will drop and the relay should cut power to the fan.
It can be done.
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Or better yet you wire the relay to 3.3v pin which goes on when the pi goes on, drops off when Pi goes off. No GPIO script needed.
I am no electronics wiz--far from it--so you would need someone to provide the finer details, specific components, whether you need to clean up my idea with resistors or diodes or whatever. Maybe a transistor would work, or a MOSFET instead of a relay. Basically, a switch that is triggered electronically. That is what you are building.
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Here is a nice thread with lots of ideas : https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=14624
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Thanks.... gives much to look at...
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@drakaen391 Just got a notice that this article was recently posted. Gives a bunch of background on triggering relays:
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@caver01 thanks man....
You just saved me a lot of time
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