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I have a feeling I'm not unable to do this but I would still rather ask the more knowledgeable folks just in case I'm either wrong or you happen to have an alternative suggestion.

I have my RP4 on a case with a miniature 5V cooling fan and I want to add this fan controller so I can control the fan speeds. However, I would also like to add a tiny screen such as the Adafruit PiOLED but as far as I understand these pins are already taken by the fan.

Am I correct? In that case, are there any other simple ways around adding this or something similar?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Edit 1:

So I moved the fan to the 3.3V GPIO pin 17 and Ground pin 20 and it still works albeit at a lower speed, which is great. However, I've tried to add dtoverlay=gpio-fan,temp=60000 to the config.txt expecting a on/off situation but it seems to remain always on, even after updating, upgrading and rebooting.

I would be happy settling with the fan only triggering when reaching the previously defined 60C as I've already managed to free the pins to add the PiOLED.

Edit 2:

The PiOLED seems to use the GPIO pins 1-6 but this 5V Controllable Fan seems to use the GPIO pins 4, 6 and 8. When checking Pinout, it looks like I could possibly keep the UART TX on pin 8, move GND to pin 9 and the 5V to 3.3V on pin 17. This would be on less power but I would be ok with that as long as it's not an issue.

Would this be ok or is this train of thought incorrect?

bakashinji
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1 Answers1

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These both appear to use I²C which is a shared resource so they could in principle be shared.

Whether this is mechanically possible is doubtful although you could solder the pins.

You certainly don't NEED a fan controller; there is kernel fan software builtin and you could use a transistor to turn fan on/off.

I doubt that you actually need a fan - the Pi runs most tasks without overheating.

Milliways
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