Advice needed for 10" Rack ESP32 cooling
from Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 02 Jul 07:28
https://piefed.social/post/996436

So I’ve got a couple of Mini PC’s and a ODROID H4+ as a NAS, all just standing on my desk at the moment.

I’m going to build them into a 10" Rack and I’d like to have a good cooling solution.

My idea is to buy something like this www.alternate.nl/Noctua/…/1917195 And wire it up with a ESP32 board and temperature probes, so that I can connect it all to a dashboard in Home Assistant.

Any advice on this project, or better alternatives would be appreciated.

#10 inch rack #cooling #esp32 #home assistant #homelab #selfhosted

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Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org on 02 Jul 07:36 next collapse

If you want to do this as an ESP project anyway, you don’t need the extra controller.

Fans take a simple PWM signal, which your ESP (or even one of the smallest Arduinos) can create easily.

Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social on 02 Jul 07:58 collapse

Good point,
I found this:
Tutorial - How to control a PWM fan with an ESP32 and Home Assistant ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-AZF6udg-Q )
I'm just going to do that but with more fans

hendrik@palaver.p3x.de on 02 Jul 09:01 next collapse

I think pretty much any mosfet / h-bridge / motor control board with pwm should do.
If you have those 4-wire fans with a pwm input that accepts 3V3 logic, you might even be able to attach them directly to the ESP:

But that's not all fans, I had some mixed results with that.

jjffnn@feddit.dk on 02 Jul 23:11 collapse

I actually have a working’ish prototype of this project laying on my table right now.
It’s a 120mm noctua fan being controlled by pwm i relation to the temperature. It also has an oled screen to show temp and fan speed. All controlled trough home assistant via esphome.
I say working’ish because the temp sensor i’m using (dht11) is unreliable and is messing up half the time, so i’m looking into buying a DS18B20 instead.
I’d be happy to share schematics and code if you’d like it.

some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org on 02 Jul 23:33 next collapse

You’re pretty rad, y’know that?

jjffnn@feddit.dk on 03 Jul 09:30 collapse

Thanks. 😀
I had to use 4 different sources to make my project work.
It wouldn’t be nice to force others to go trough the same amount of trouble when i already have the files.

Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social on 03 Jul 08:08 collapse

That would be amazing thanks, I've barely worked with Arduino but I just ordered a starter kit to play around with and learn.

jjffnn@feddit.dk on 03 Jul 09:28 collapse

I made a git repo with the schematic and yaml file for you, if you have any questions feel free to ask.
I may not know the answer, but i’ll do my best to help.