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Watercooled PC Fan Monitor

Fan speed controller for a watercooled computer.

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This is a simple device to monitor the coolant temperature of a water cooled computer and adjust the fan speed accordingly.

The idea is to maintain the minimum fan RPM to keep the computer from overheating so that noise is kept to a minimum

It's also intended to control the speed of a PWM enabled pump, and monitor the flow rate using a Koolance flow rate sensor.

Current design constraints:

The system will monitor and control:

  • 3 Fans
  • 1 Pump
  • 1 Flow rate sensor
  • 2 Temperature sensors (ambient and coolant)

This could be potentially expanded, but this is all my system requires.

Communication is intended to be over both USB and RS232

  • 1 × STM32F411 Microprocessors, Microcontrollers, DSPs / ARM, RISC-Based Microcontrollers
  • 1 × CD4050 Electronic Components / Misc. Electronic Components
  • 1 × Koolance INS-FM14 Liquid flow rate sensor
  • 1 × 25LC320 Memory ICs / EEPROMs

  • PCBs made

    Matt Tyson12/28/2021 at 01:22 0 comments

    I've got some PCBs made at JLCPCB.  There's a couple of minor goofs in the PCB design, but nothing too major.

    • Not enough ground pins for the unused LCD pins that need to be tied to ground.
    • LM317 voltage regulator gets pretty toasty.  I need to swap that out for a switchmode regulator.
    • Pin header alignment is bad in a lot of cases.
    • Flow rate sensor should probably be connected to TIM5 instead of TIM3.

    None of these are too much of a problem and easily worked around for the time being, they can be fixed in the next revision of the PCB.

    For now I'll be continuing developing the firmware.  There's still lots more to do.

  • On Hold

    Matt Tyson06/10/2021 at 07:10 0 comments

    Flow rate monitoring and basic RS232 comms is implemented.

    Project is largely on hold at the moment.

    Next step is to make a proper PCB with surface mount components, but the STM32 microcontrollers are unavailable at prototyping fab shops or anywhere really.

  • Flow rate and serial console

    Matt Tyson03/21/2021 at 02:05 0 comments

    Liquid flow rate captured using a Koolance INS-FM14 flow rate sensor.

    Basic serial console that prints out system information implemented.

    Next:

    Code cleanup.

    Serial console input.

  • Basic control loop implemented

    Matt Tyson03/13/2021 at 08:34 0 comments

    PWM control of fans is implemented.

    Temperature monitoring is implemented

    Basic control loop of reading temperature and update fan speed from curve is implemented.

    Next tasks:

    Implement flow rate monitoring.

    Implement RS-232 serial interface.

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Discussions

s wrote 03/07/2021 at 04:30 point

what kind of display is that? looks interesting

  Are you sure? yes | no

Matt Tyson wrote 03/07/2021 at 21:21 point

It's a 256x64 OLED SSD1322 display I bought of aliexpress. The U8G2 lcd library is driving it.

  Are you sure? yes | no

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