Installing the RPi fan shim

The fan shim is an add-on for the Raspberry Pi to help keep the processor running cool when it’s working hard and as we’re going to be doing game development that sounds like a good idea for us because we probably will be pushing the processor with some of the software that we’ll be using. Ao let’s see what we need to do. So i have already assembled my fan shim following the instructions here and i’ve been running my Raspberry Pi with the fan shim installed and fitted physically and that means it runs automatically all the time but there is some additional software that we can use and this will give a bit more control over the fan shim including switching it on and off so that it’s not on all the time, it’s only on when the extra cooling is required. To install the fan shim we need to use the terminal window and i’m just going to copy the instructions from the web page here and type these in. And let’s see if i can copy and paste these just to save my typing and there we go. That’s it getting the files and there’s a ‘cd’ command is to change directory so it’s created a folder called “fanshim-python” in my home folder here and change directory to that and this is a script to install the software just installing a few packages and you can see the progress it’s got here okay it takes a few minutes to run “Enjoy your Fan Shim.

Done”, so we got there 02:18 - They recommend or suggest some settings here at temperatures at which to activate and deactivate let me just check i’ve copied this correctly from here oh there we go pasted ctrl-shift-v to paste into the terminal and we can see if we scroll through And i can actually hear already that my fan has stopped in the Raspberry Pi so and there’s a little green led that’s lit up as well so presumably that means that the fan is not required just now because the temperature is low. I do have a small concern that with the Raspberry Pi the official case which is the one i bought there are no air gaps when the lid is on so how that will affect the fan and the cooling i don’t know there’s a lot of alternative cases out there that do have venting or cooling built into them to help keep your Raspberry Pi 4 cool and I may also look at those in due course. That’s all, nice short video for for now .