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Cooling mod for the X96 Air

I realized after my Ugoos box died that overheating is a big problem with cheap Android TV boxes. A teardown of the Ugoos box shows that it does not have any heatsink or fan at all!

 The X96 Air does have a heatsink, but the heatsink is located at the bottom of the casing with no ventilation.

In this default configuration, with the ambient room temperature at 25c and playing a 1080p video, I was seeing the CPU temperature at 67c.

I drilled a couple of holes at the bottom of the casing.

The CPU temperature fell to 59c with the box raised about 2cm with plastic blocks.

I retrieved an old 5V laptop fan:

Then cut and strip away a spare USB cable:


Solder the red and black wires on the fan and the cable:


Secure the fan to the bottom of the casing with double-sided tape, then plug the fan into the box's USB connector.


Here's a view of the box with some 3D-printed risers installed at the bottom to give the mounted fan sufficient clearance:

The CPU now runs at 43c, a huge drop from the no-fan situation!

The only problem is the fan is always running when the box is powered up, and I cannot find any way to control the fan programmatically. Which is a shame, because otherwise it would be possible to write a script to only turn on the fan when the CPU gets too hot, and turn it off when the CPU temperature drops sufficiently.


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Comments

  1. Dan MacDonald31 May 2022 at 18:56

    I have fixed this problem with a USB relay module and a python script I wrote called CH340-fan-control.py

    https://github.com/danboid/CH340-fan-control

    ReplyDelete

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