This page is no longer being updated and the new repo is uptime-industries/compute-blade

Compute Blade Fan Unit

When just a fan is ... boring

About The Project

The main purpose is to cool Compute Blade installed in the enclosure.
Requires 1 Fan Unit per 2 Blades. That is, up to 10 Fan Units per 19" enclosure.

There were many iterations.There are two versions left in the final:

• Smart Fan Unit, based on Raspberry Pi RP2040 and EMC2101
• not Smart Fan Unit (or just Dumb Fan Unit)

Dumb Fan Unit Features

• Isolated powering from both blades at the same time, control from the left in the pair.
• It is possible to control the speed of fan rotation and get the current speed (RPM). As with any 4-pin PWM Fan.

Smart Fan Unit Features

• 2 UART for communication with blades
• 2 temperature sensors
• 2 LEDs for indicating which blade is working
• 2 Digital RGB LEDs
• 1 LED to GPIO25
• PWM fan
• Button that can be assigned to any action
• Reset and BOOT buttons (for RP2040 code development)

Various usage scenarios are possible.

For example

• It adjusts the speed and color of the digital LEDs depending on the temperature of the airflow. You can specify the desired speed from both blades simply by UART.
• Blades can report processor temperatures via UART, and the Fan Unit sets the fan speed and color of the digital LEDs. The button can work for blade identification.
• TBD

Images

20x Fan Units in 2U 19"

5x Fan Units in 1U 10"

Smart Fan Unit v0.8

Authors

• Merocle - Ivan Kuleshov