Carefully Researched Raspberry Pi 3 Active Cooling

While it may not be a problem for normal Raspberry Pi use, when pushed to its limits, these boards will eventually overheat. Once they hit 85°C (185°F), the board responds by either running at a lower speed, or even shutting down completely. As reported here, this wasn’t acceptable for a team at Microsoft Research, which was working on porting image and AI models to run on the Raspberry Pi. Without cooling accommodations, these processor-intensive tasks take the board’s temperature well above the 85° threshold, necessitating a solution to keep things at a more reasonable range.

While most would stick a heat sync or fan on the board and call it a day, this wasn’t good enough for the team, which took infrared images of the Pi running at idle, and after running their AI model for a few minutes. What they found was that while the entire board heats up, the processor temperature shoots well above the rest of the board.

Their solution was to mount a cooling fan just larger than a quarter at an angle to the processor, implementing a 3D-printed bracket to allow use with the Raspberry Pi touchscreen. The fan, along with a heat sync did the trick, keeping the processor at under 50°C under full load. Temperature readings over time were also taken using just a heat sync, just a fan, and no additional cooling apparatus whatsoever. Certainly interesting data for those looking to optimize their hardware performance.