PoE Hat With Cooler?

#1

Good morning everyone! I’m just getting stared with my Radxa Rock 5b and am wondering if anyone is able to confirm whether or not the active cooler fits under the PoE hat (I.e. Is there enough clearance). I’m contemplating whether that would be the best option vs tiny fan on the PoE hat and a heatsink only.

I highly doubt I’ll be keeping the little SBC under enough sustained load that it will be the issue, but given the high ambient temperature in the network closet during the peak summer season, I cam concerned that the little guy will either die, or throttle to the point of uselessness without an active cooler. I’m currently using the KKSB ROCK 5B case sans the heatsink since I can’t use that and the PoE hat. That case should provide plenty of ventilation, I just have to create the air movement internally.

#2

Radxa POE HAT has his own fan and there is special overlay for that one. You can fit only small heatsink between POE hat and board. Take a look ho this work on Rock 5A

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Same thing on Rock 5B:

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1 Like
#3

Thanks Dominick. That’s the impression that I got as well and have ordered a 40x40x5mm heatsink, I just wasn’t sure if the tiny fan on the PoE Hat would be sufficient.

What I’m currently trying to figure out is if the Radxa certificate issue I’ve seen referred to in year old posts is why my apt upgrade command fails and produces a fcks error at boot on the Build 39 Debian image. I found https://apt.radxa.com referenced, but the wget fails on my end.

I plan to do some more digging today to determine the proper fix for that. Once I can get the OS stable, I’ll look into PoE Hat overlay scripting to operate the fan. I should have some time though since the heatsink doesn’t arrive until tomorrow.

#4

I did something like this with GPIO risers:

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This has enabled me to put in a bigger heatsink