REVIEW
Pimoroni Fan SHIM
Pimoroni
Fan SHIM
@concreted0gA breath of fresh air for your Raspberry Pi
By Jo Hinchliffet’s a much-discussed fact that the
Raspberry Pi 4 is a great performer,
but if you push your little computer
to the limit, it gets a bit hot. Many
Raspberry Pi 4 users have added fans
to their systems, coming up with all
manner of DIY mounts. However, Pimoroni offer
a very elegant-looking solution off the shelf: the
‘Fan SHIM’.
The Fan SHIM kit includes a clever way to non-
permanently but securely mount the fan, without any
soldering. Pimoroni have also developed a software
library which offers some simple ways to automate
fan control settings as well as providing a platform for
if you want to tinker with the settings more deeply.
We ordered a Fan SHIM which arrived very quickly
and came well-packed in a nice branded box. Inside
the box, the Fan SHIM is a tiny, thin PCB – the fan
is a separate item. The fan is wired to a small JST
connector, with the wires neatly protected with heat-
shrink tubing. You’ll also find a small bag containing
some nylon nuts and bolts, plus the obligatory spare
set for when you lose one in your carpet.
There are some instructions on the Pimoroni
website about how to assemble the Fan SHIM, but
it’s simple enough. Two bolts are inserted up through
the PCB, and a nut is tightened down on them to act
as a spacer to lift the fan slightly off the PCB. Then the
fan is fitted with the wires facing the lower side of the
Fan SHIM. Two nuts are then run down on top of the
remaining bolt thread to clamp the fan in place. Noting
the orientation of the wires the JST is connected to is
quite fiddly, but in the end, we did this with a pair of
tweezers as it’s such a small connector.The Fan SHIM can now be fitted to
Raspberry Pi 4; it uses a friction fit over
the Raspberry Pi’s header pins to hold it in place,
so requires no soldering. Powering on the Raspberry
Pi and without making any changes or installing
anything, the fan starts running straight away. It was
good to note that it was very quiet, barely perceivable
at all.
Of course, we might not want the fan to be on
all the time, so setting it up to automatically turn
on and off at certain temperatures, akin to a regular
laptop computer fan, was our next step. The team at
Pimoroni have written a small Python library for fan
control, and again the instructions online give you aneasy-to-follow guide to installing and configuring the
settings using the terminal app in Raspbian.
In the library example to automate the fan, the
user can change the thresholds of what temperature
the fan turns on, turns off, and how often it checks
the temperature. It’s also set up to use the on-boardPIMORONI £9.60 shop.pimoroni.comI
Above
The Fan SHIM
kit arrives
nicely packaged
from PimoroniIf you’re doing some serious
number crunching, the Fan
SHIM is a good cooling option”
”