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Technical Support / Using PAW Classic's 5v header for fan power?
« on: October 06, 2023, 01:44:34 pm »
Hi,
I have a "classic" PAW in a repurposed Stratux case which has been working well since the earliest days of PilotAware. I recently added a second wifi dongle to use iGrid, this works very well until the unit has been running for an hour or so when the wifi connection to my tablet starts to intermittently drop. I have isolated the cause as excessive heat (primarily generated by the RTL dongle) causing the wifi dongle to drop out, and adding a small 5v fan to the case seems to entirely solve the problem.
As I'm using a Raspberry Pi 2 which does not have built-in wifi I do not have any spare USB ports to power the fan. I've been testing with a separate cable running to the second USB port on my powerbank, but notice there are unpopulated pads on the classic PAW board JP2 header marked 5v and GND which appear to route directly to the GPIO pins on the Pi. The fan only draws 60mA (though presumably has a slightly higher draw at start-up) - would I be OK to power it from these unused pads on the PAW board?
Many thanks,
Tim
I have a "classic" PAW in a repurposed Stratux case which has been working well since the earliest days of PilotAware. I recently added a second wifi dongle to use iGrid, this works very well until the unit has been running for an hour or so when the wifi connection to my tablet starts to intermittently drop. I have isolated the cause as excessive heat (primarily generated by the RTL dongle) causing the wifi dongle to drop out, and adding a small 5v fan to the case seems to entirely solve the problem.
As I'm using a Raspberry Pi 2 which does not have built-in wifi I do not have any spare USB ports to power the fan. I've been testing with a separate cable running to the second USB port on my powerbank, but notice there are unpopulated pads on the classic PAW board JP2 header marked 5v and GND which appear to route directly to the GPIO pins on the Pi. The fan only draws 60mA (though presumably has a slightly higher draw at start-up) - would I be OK to power it from these unused pads on the PAW board?
Many thanks,
Tim