Fan control and temperature on the DevTerm R01

DevTerm Firmware and Apps
1

The build instructions for the R01 refer to devterm-fan-control-rpi package, but that contains a script that relies on the existence of the Raspberry Pi-specific /opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd command to read the temperature, and that does not exist.

What’s a good way to monitor temperature on the R01?

2

This doesn’t answer your question, but from my testing with other Allwinner D1-based devices it’ll never get anywhere close to a temperature where you’d need to turn the fan on.

Had a look at my benchmarks for the Sipeed Nezha D1: 1.1W under full sustained load. That’s for the entire board, with HDMI display connected.

1 Like
3

I’m not complaining about not needing the fan :slight_smile: just wanting to see what the hardware / software options are here. Probably worth documenting somewhere on the wiki, that it should not be expected or needed.

For now, I’ve made an i3-block that displays the following

TEMP=$((cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp / 1000))

This seems to work well enough!

4

Following up on my own thread here - specific to the R01.

The GitHub wiki page on building for the R01 refers to installing the devterm-fan-temp-daemon-rpi package. This is pointless, as the code will not work at all. I recommended removing that from the build.

I created a couple of shell functions for myself (note that I switched myself to zsh from bash, so these might need to be modified) to check temperature, and to switch fan on and off if needed, which is unlikely.

function temp() {
	(( temp = $((`cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp` / 1000)) ))
	echo $temp C
}

function fanon() {
	gpio mode 41 out
	gpio write 41 1
}

function fanoff() {
	gpio mode 41 out
	gpio write 41 0
}

I’m still looking into a good way to enable user access to gpio, as mentioned here.