JJJ's Blog

Raspberry Pi 4, Ubuntu 20.04, PoE Hat Fan Control

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JJJ
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I recently acquired an 8Gb Raspberry Pi 4 and promptly installed Ubuntu 20.04 on it to see how it worked. Right away, I was excited that the PoE Hat worked and that it booted without any problems, except that the fan on the Hat was no longer controllable the way that it used to be.

It appears that the old way of using config.txt and friends to override those settings no longer works.

Here’s what you need to do:

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/50-rpi-fan.rules

Put this in it to start with, and tweak as needed for your situation:

SUBSYSTEM=="thermal"
KERNEL=="thermal_zone3"

# If the temp hits 81C, highest RPM
ATTR{trip_point_0_temp}="82000"
ATTR{trip_point_0_hyst}="3000"
#
# If the temp hits 80C, higher RPM
ATTR{trip_point_1_temp}="81000"
ATTR{trip_point_1_hyst}="2000"
#
# If the temp hits 70C, higher RPM
ATTR{trip_point_2_temp}="71000"
ATTR{trip_point_2_hyst}="3000"
#
# If the temp hits 60C, turn on the fan
ATTR{trip_point_3_temp}="61000"
ATTR{trip_point_3_hyst}="5000"
#
# Fan is off otherwise

Comments

2 responses to “Raspberry Pi 4, Ubuntu 20.04, PoE Hat Fan Control”

  1. Gene Avatar
    Gene

    I tried using Ubuntu 20.04 with my raspberry pi 4 having 4GB of RAM. I’m talking about desktop Gnome plugged in to monitor. It’s very slow and often it overheats and hangs. I don’t have an active cooling just passive one. But I didn’t enjoy using Ubuntu Focal Fossa at all. How’s yours?

    1. JJJ Avatar
      JJJ

      I haven’t plugged mine into a monitor yet, but the desire to try and play games with it is pretty strong. My only active cooling comes via the fan on the PoE Hat, but I don’t think it really does a whole lot. I haven’t experienced any hangs or overheats yet, but they do seem somewhat common.

      Did you use a 4k display? If so, how was it?