This is another showcase of 3D-printing for a project I’m working on. So I’ve had this old broken laptop laying around. The thing is probably 20 years old and had this huge blower fan in it. I already threw the old enclosure away but I’ll show you what I did to the fan and the newer enclosure which fits the Raspberry Pi.
Here are the pics:
I cut the fan out of it’s existing cage and glued it to the bottom of this 3D-printed one.
The top part actually consists of a flat part which I painted with nail color. I then added the logo slide which is only 0.6mm thick. (If anyone would try to donate a multi-color 3D printer I’ll happily oblige..)
To regulate the fan speed a little additional circuitry is needed. For those playing along at home I made the layout for a PWM-transistor thingy that allows for a range bigger than just turning the fan on or off. Schematic is as follows:
This is a simple n-channel mosfet, in this case a zvn4306a that I had laying around. The 10k-resistor is needed to drain the gate capacitance of the FET. The motor actually survives voltages higher than 5 volts, but since it’s connected to a raspberry pi and this is the highest voltage we can get without tinkering, we’ll just use that.