How to connect a fan to a Rock 4 board

If you are struggling to keep your Rock 4 board cool, mounting a fan could be the relief you’re looking for. In this tutorial we’ll see how to connect a fan to the GPIO pins of your Rock 4 single board computer. After having completed this tutorial, the temperature of the CPU of your Rock will drop drastically and always remain at an optimal level.

The Rock’s CPU could get really hot under normal load or even at idle. Because an effective heat dissipation solution is really important for the Rock, beside placing a heatsink on the CPU, we advise to use well ventilated cases as our self-made 3D-printed case and / or mounting a fan. In most cases a well designed open enclosure will do the job. But for some applications with an intensive CPU usage, a fan is really helpful.

The Rock 4C+ board is a perfect alternative to the Raspberry Pi 4

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What you’ll need for this tutorial

• a Rock 4 board, of course 🙂
• a good case, suitable for mounting a fan
• a fan (30x30x7 mm), including the bolts and nuts

Mount the fan on the lid

Let’s see now how to mount a fan on our 3D-printed Rock cases …

1. Take the fan and turn it in such a way that you can see the label (on top).
2. Take the cover part (base part for the Rock 4SE) of the case and place it in such a way that the 4 legs are pointing toward the sky.
3. Before placing the fan on the cover, position the 3 spokes of the cover in front of the spokes of the fan. If necessary, rotate the fan 90° as many times as necessary.
4. Once the right position is found, clamp the fan onto the cover without using too much force. It should fit nicely.
5. Double check the position of the fan by looking through the ventilation gaps of the cover. You should only see 3 spokes.
6. Now you can mount the fan on the cover with the bolts and nuts as shown in the pictured below. Skip this step for the Rock 4SE. It’s not necessary to use the bolts and nuts here. Just make sure the fan is well clamped.

Connect the wires

Continue with the electrical part now. The fan can be connected to the 3.3V or to the 5V pin of the GPIO pins of your Rock 4 board. Obviously, while the fan is connected to the 3.3V pin, it spins less quickly and the flow rate will be less important. But with this setup you almost won’t hear the fan spinning. For most cases, a 3.3V supply will keep your Rock single board computer perfectly cool. Depending on your needs, it’s up to you to choose one of the two options.

Have a look at the image below to see how to connect your fan to the GPIO-pins of your Rock single board computer.

• Connect the black cable to any Ground pin of your Rock 4 board.
• For the red cable you have the choice between pin 02 and pin 04 (5V) or pin 01 (3.3V).

Respect the colors of the wires!

Once the connectors in place, just mount the cover on the bottom part of the case.

Great! You’re done and your Rock will always keep cool from now on.

Remarks

If you have connected the fan to the 3.3V, it is possible that the fan does not start to spin automatically at the very first start up. You can then give the fan “a little push” in counterclockwise direction with a small object. Normally it should start immediately then. If this does not work, you can first connect the fan to the 5V pin.

Check https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock4/4cplus to find more info about the Rock 4C plus board.

Check https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock4/se to find more info about the Rock 4SE board.