Fixed my CM5 overheating problem with a riser and a thin thermal pad

[Kirou]

Wow! It’s so… big! For me, it’s very efficient, I confirm!

[GesicMerrybeard]

Hey did you buy the 100x100x0.5 and use it two times of so you could also just use 100x100x1

[Wander_Menezes]

Greetings from Brazil.

This is my first post on the forum, arriving after what felt like an epic campaign to get a uConsole with a CM5 to boot from an SD card—only to be defeated by a stubborn “failed to open device ‘sdcard’.” I lost, decisively. And with that, I also lost one of the CM platform’s quiet pleasures: swapping operating systems as easily as swapping cards. For context, I’m not using the Lite—this is the 4/32 variant. After too many shutdowns, too many card swaps, and too many attempts to outsmart the thing, I gave up. It’s the kind of problem that breeds a low-grade anxiety (call it comic, if you like). In the end, I flashed DragonOS to the eMMC. Life is short, and my interest is SDR. Sometimes the better outcome isn’t being right—it’s being done.

When the CM5—or the HG board—eventually behaves like the CM4 in this regard, I’ll happily try again. For now, this is where things stand.

That prelude aside, I live in a hot country, and I wanted to share a simple, inexpensive, and practical way to keep the CM5’s temperature in check. I’ve had excellent results using a clip-on “gaming phone” cooler—there are plenty of versions out there. It works surprisingly well because it leverages the aluminum body to dissipate heat across the entire console. Yes, it draws power; that’s the trade-off. But the balance is reasonable. In my case, it drops temperatures by as much as 23°C in short order, which keeps thermal throttling at bay. And, if I may offer a suggestion to the folks at ClockworkPi: please, for the love of God—or any higher power you prefer—consider a proper accessory based on semiconductor cooling, a Peltier module. It sounds like black magic, but it isn’t, and low-power options do exist.

In the end, that’s it. It simply works—efficient, effective, and, most importantly, enough to get on with the radio.

[trinity]

The snap-on cooler is a neat gadget and certainly worth mentioning in this thread. Heed this warning about Peltier cooling though:

@trinity

Peltier modules are semiconductors that, when powered, move thermal energy from one side to another, making one side cool and the other side hot, but when the hot side reaches its heat capacity it will overheat and melt internal components, effectively self-destructing. A Peltier module used in this fashion will have a significantly shortened life span.

The cooling module you have may well be a Peltier module, but it also has a good amount of active heat dissipation in the form of a fan so the module doesn’t overheat. Using the fan alone would be significantly more efficient than using it alongside a Peltier module because the electrical energy used to power the semiconductor to apply the Peltier effect would be dissipated from the circuitry in the form of heat energy, making the system as a whole hotter.