May, 17th, 2024
If you have a Raspberry Pi Power Over Ethernet (POE) Hat, on your Pi, you know that it has a fan. I mean really know. Once the pi gets up to temp, they whine like there is no tomorrow. Here is the trick to get rid of the noise while still keeping your Pi cool.
Jeff Geerling has a small script to add to a Pi to have the fan ramp up and down with the temperature of the CPU. It is ear saving and makes a pi near silent. As a bonus, after setting it up, if the fan ever ramps up to speed and never comes down, you know there is something wrong with the Pi.
The link, the process. Takes about 2 minutes
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/taking-control-pi-poe-hats-overly-aggressive-fan
- SSH into your pi
- Nano into /boot/firmware/config.txt
- Use the down arrow to go to the bottom of this file.
- Add these 5 lines changing the temp to whatever you prefer. Noting 65 Degrees Celsius = 65000. In addition, the fan has 4 speeds this just sets at what temperatures the fan speed changes. I wanted it to be super silent so my temperature targets are very aggressive.
# PoE Hat Fan Speeds
dtparam=poe_fan_temp0=65000
dtparam=poe_fan_temp1=70000
dtparam=poe_fan_temp2=75000
dtparam=poe_fan_temp3=80000- Press “Control + o”, “Control + x” on your keyboard to save and exit
- Press ‘Enter’ to confirm
- This will close the nano text editor
- reboot your pi using the command
sudo reboot now - The fan should work with your new settings now
- Listen to the sweet silence
Conclusion
I have found that this simple change is very effective with 6 Pies and 6 POE hats, my office was full of angry white noise. Now I can work in peace and quiet. If a fan goes up, I know that pi is working hard and if the fan stays ramped up, I know to take a look at the processes it is running.