Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#51

Post by willis936 » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 11:12 AM UTC

throwaway-9320 wrote: post #37

rc4hobby wrote: post #21

Thermal engineer here. There absolutely no need to use fan cooling, humongous heatsinks or harebrained temperature controller schemes to cool the raspberry pi 4. All that is needed is a small heatsink to slightly decrease the thermal resistance to ambient air, to stay below the thermal throttling threshold. Anything more complicated than that is a pointless exercise in pointlessness.

Fan cooling a Raspberry Pi 4 is such an odd thing to do. You are essentially taking one of the pros of the Pi - quiet and reliable operation - and replacing it with a moving part that will not offer too much benefit and will eventually wear out or start having issues.

As someone who uses pis and MCUs, I don’t find anything that relies on a micro sd card to be reliable.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#52

Post by majewsky » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

lloeki wrote: post #34

_gfrc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running a raspberry 3 with a cheap sandisk sd card for years now without any SD Card issues. It runs a DNS based ad-blocker and a vpn. I am logging everything to ram instead of writing it to the card and that's about it. I never encountered any issue with SD Card reliability, despite me sometimes just pulling the plug instead of properly shutting it down. Here is a simple guide: https://raspberrypi.stackexc…

Many problems with SD cards are actually rooted in power issues (bad power source or usb device that eats power). Ever since I took proper measures to ensure stable enough power I've had no issue (Pi 3B here)

Can you elaborate on these measures? Sounds interesting.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#53

Post by kingosticks » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 11:17 AM UTC

vardump wrote: post #42

The article is dated November 22, 2019, which makes me wonder whether it was before the Raspberry Pi 4 firmware upgrade that reduced heat generation quite a bit. My two 4GB Raspberry Pi 4s have had no thermal issues. Running the same measurement script now, will report back the results. Edit: Ok, done with the tests. Both RPi4s are bare and should be running exactly the same versions. RPi4 #1 started at 51C, peak 79C…

Are you talking about the update described at https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-4-might-... which is mentioned in the article? Or something else?

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#54

Post by vardump » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 11:22 AM UTC

kingosticks wrote: post #53

vardump wrote: post #42

The article is dated November 22, 2019, which makes me wonder whether it was before the Raspberry Pi 4 firmware upgrade that reduced heat generation quite a bit. My two 4GB Raspberry Pi 4s have had no thermal issues. Running the same measurement script now, will report back the results. Edit: Ok, done with the tests. Both RPi4s are bare and should be running exactly the same versions. RPi4 #1 started at 51C, peak 79C…

Are you talking about the update described at https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-4-might-... which is mentioned in the article? Or something else?

Possibly.

I haven't closely followed RPi4 firmware development, but I did notice positive changes since June 2019. I think there have been at least two occasions that dropped the (idle) operating temperatures.

In any case, I'm happy with their thermal performance.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#55

Post by vardump » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 11:27 AM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #51

throwaway-9320 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fan cooling a Raspberry Pi 4 is such an odd thing to do. You are essentially taking one of the pros of the Pi - quiet and reliable operation - and replacing it with a moving part that will not offer too much benefit and will eventually wear out or start having issues.

As someone who uses pis and MCUs, I don’t find anything that relies on a micro sd card to be reliable.

You can USB or network boot a Pi. Also in my experience over 9 years: just don't use Sandisk cards and you're fine. Samsung (Pro|Evo) branded cards have worked for me.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#56

Post by kingosticks » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 11:31 AM UTC

reitanqild wrote: post #5

Anyone has links to similar articles with regards to either - SD card reliability - techniques for reliably using what we have ? Given that people are using these for all kinds of stuff there must be some advanced techniques being used (or some basic I have missed).

The easiest is to eliminate the SD card by either booting from network, move the rootfs to a USB drive, or boot from a USB drive (now available for Pi 4 with beta firmware). These are documented at https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#57

Post by smichel17 » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 11:40 AM UTC

Arnt wrote: post #24

rc4hobby wrote: post #21

Thermal engineer here. There absolutely no need to use fan cooling, humongous heatsinks or harebrained temperature controller schemes to cool the raspberry pi 4. All that is needed is a small heatsink to slightly decrease the thermal resistance to ambient air, to stay below the thermal throttling threshold. Anything more complicated than that is a pointless exercise in pointlessness.

Would you describe that flirc case as complicated? To a naïve layman, it seems like the smallest all-metal case that'll fit the rpi4, made so that the metal acts as a heatsink. Which may be more heatsink area than a 15W CPU needs, but not bigger case area than is needed. Is there something I'm missing?

I got a pi 4 around 6 months ago and got the flirc case based on the recommendation of TFA. I've been very pleased with it - makes the pi look nice; I no longer worry about other people touching it; and of course it cools well (the very thick thermal pad connecting to the case is a bit unusual, but it works).

I got the flirc usb dongle for remotes at the same time, since I thought I'd want it (my pi is a media center) and there was a discount at the time if you bought both it and the case.. I've been far less impressed. It's a great idea in theory, but in my experience there was enough flakiness/delay with each button press, especially with Kodi for some reason, that it was basically unusable. Also, their utility for programming the dongle did not run well on the pi itself (it stores configuration on-device so you don't need to program it from the device you'll be using it on), and the install process involved setting up a repo that is served over http and does not have an associated gpg key, which gave me a bad feeling (although overall it felt more like a startup flying by the rest of its pants than anything malicious). I am somewhat hopeful that with more time/polish these issues will be fixed in software, but can't currently recommend it.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#58

Post by avian » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

lloeki wrote: post #34

_gfrc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running a raspberry 3 with a cheap sandisk sd card for years now without any SD Card issues. It runs a DNS based ad-blocker and a vpn. I am logging everything to ram instead of writing it to the card and that's about it. I never encountered any issue with SD Card reliability, despite me sometimes just pulling the plug instead of properly shutting it down. Here is a simple guide: https://raspberrypi.stackexc…

Many problems with SD cards are actually rooted in power issues (bad power source or usb device that eats power). Ever since I took proper measures to ensure stable enough power I've had no issue (Pi 3B here)

> Many problems with SD cards are actually rooted in power issues

Does anyone have any info on this that's more substantial than hearsay? Experiments, measurements or at least a more technical explanation than "bad power source"?

I'm persistently hearing this story that power supply quality affects SD card life. As an electrical engineer, and given what I know about R. Pi design, I fail to see how an SD card could get physically damaged by any reasonable power supply that would otherwise run the rest of the R.Pi.

I suspect people are confusing filesystem corruption due to brownouts/OS not shutting down cleanly with physical damage to the flash (i.e. unreadable sectors on SD card)

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#59

Post by willis936 » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 11:56 AM UTC

vardump wrote: post #55

willis936 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who uses pis and MCUs, I don’t find anything that relies on a micro sd card to be reliable.

You can USB or network boot a Pi. Also in my experience over 9 years: just don't use Sandisk cards and you're fine. Samsung (Pro|Evo) branded cards have worked for me.

Network boot adds even more points of failure. USB boot is very attractive, but also very new. I’ll play around with it once it’s out of beta and the setup procedure is established.

I use Samsung Evo cards and haven’t had an issue with them either. My problem is one of confidence. I have no data to suggest that these cards won’t just hard fail at some point in the next five years. Simply doing better than their competitors in the micro SD card space is not good enough.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#60

Post by kingosticks » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 12:01 PM UTC

vardump wrote: post #54

kingosticks wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about the update described at https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-4-might-... which is mentioned in the article? Or something else?

Possibly. I haven't closely followed RPi4 firmware development, but I did notice positive changes since June 2019. I think there have been at least two occasions that dropped the (idle) operating temperatures. In any case, I'm happy with their thermal performance.

I've also a feeling there were two things they changed but I don't recall what the first one was. And I don't think there's been any more improvements since November so I think this article includes everything so far.

When the pi 4 first came out, mine throttled when driving two screens and that was depressing. I've not tried that setup again since but I really should.