Temperature controlled cooling system (Part 1 – The Plan)

1 Comment January 29, 2015

A good friend of mine has built an pretty awesome custom desk for his office.  His desktop has a nice spot, behind a glass door in the desk.  The only problem is that it gets warm in there when the desktop is running.  He built a pair of fans with filters into the desk to cool the area where the desktop lives – but has to remember to turn them on when he turns the PC on.

We talked a bit and have in the end, he basically only needs a sensor that can track how warm the storage area is verses the room temperature and based on the difference, turns on the fans at varying speeds to cool the desktop.


I would also like to have at least some kind of indicator light to let me know what the controller thinks it is doing – so I plan to use a Red/Blue two color LED as my indicator and progress

To start with, I’ve broken out the ranges like this

Difference Fan Speed Indicator
< 2°C OFF NO LED
< 4°C 25% 100% BLUE
< 8°C 50% 50% / 50% BLUE/RED
< 10°C 75% 25% / 75% BLUE/RED
10°C + 100% 100% RED


It’ll take some testing to see if these speed and temperature actually work or not…. but I can at least get him something to test.

Here’s a little demo video of the prototype working…


Next will be to make some decisions on how I want the displays to work and how much more complicated it will get…


1 Comment

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    debbie April 13, 2015 3:37 AM

    this is awesome. . I really liked this.