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When I received the Helioclock image I wasn’t certain which Pi4 to run it on but I’m really happy that I chose to run it on a repurposed Helium Miner that I had collecting dust.
The SenseCAP M1 unit has a Rpi4b, with either 8 GB or 4 GB of RAM. It includes an excellent USB-C type power supply and a quality heatsink/fan.
To enable the Fan on your build is trivial and so far this has been a solid performer in my shack!
The Fan is controlled by a MOSFET triggered by GPIO 13. The way it’s connected in the M1 supports the dtoverlay method of activation. You simply need to add a single line to your Pi’s config.txt file. Add the following line to the very bottom of the file, then reboot.
dtoverlay=gpio-fan,gpiopin=13,temp=55000,temp_hyst=5000
You can either mount the SD Card in windows to make this change or if you have console access you can do it on the Pi itself.
sudo nano /boot/firmware/config.txt
The way the item is configured is that the Fan will turn on at 55 degrees Celsius (temp), then will lower the temp by at least 5 degrees (temp_hyst) before switching off. if you like, you could choose different numbers for your build.
Another interesting piece, to re-purposing a SenseCAP M1 is the included Seeed WM1302 LORA card, with the right config you could use this for any LORA project you could imagine. I removed mine for now, since I know of no drivers or software in this project, but potential candidate down the road?
Subject: Re: Helioclock – SenseCAP M1 Fan Control
Hi,
This is excellent, thank you for sharing it. The dtoverlay approach is clean, kernel-level, and requires no external daemon, which is exactly the kind of solution that belongs on the Helioclock forum so others can benefit from it. A lot of hams are sitting on idle Helium miners right now and this is a great second life for that hardware.
Would you be willing to post this to the Helioclock community forum at helioclock.com/forums? It deserves to be findable by anyone else with a SenseCAP M1 or similar GPIO-controlled fan setup.
On the WM1302 LoRa card, you’re right that there are no drivers or software hooks for it in the current build. It’s a genuinely interesting piece of hardware though and I’ll keep it in mind as the project evolves.
Thanks again for the detailed writeup.
73,
Anthony
KA9NWM
Helioclock Support
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