FAN MODDED NETWORK SWITCH

As usual, i get bored and something else gets my attention and ya know the story. Well i did notice that after a few hours of being on my network switch got pretty warm. Ya know what THAT means... FAN MOD TIME.

Just like my ADSL modem, my network switch needed a fan, 1, because it got hot, and 2, it would now match my adsl modem. So... here goes.

What i started with. A Starnet 8 port network switch. SH-9008P. Its nothing special, no special features, but it does work like a charm and i can get good speeds out of it.

Its effectively the big brother of THIS switch. Ok so what does it look like inside?

As you can see, even stock it comes with a heatsink on the main chip. As usual i cant resist knowing what kind of chip it is, so i pulled the heatsinks off.

There. I have no idea what it is. But it gets warm and thats all i care about.

First thing i did was work out where i could put a fan so it would fit inside without messing anything up, and to make sure the case had enough ventiliation in the first place so a fan would actually help.

As you can see the lid of the switch has ventiliation slots, so they will do. I dont want to make a mess out of this thing.

Ok. Fan.

Some default fan of something. I think it was a 486 cooler. I nabbed the fan and cleaned it up and it works like a charm. Ok where to put it?

There. With putting the lid on and off, i made sure that it wouldnt go and rest against anything internal inside the switch.

I cut the hole with a soldering iron first, to make the rough hole.

And then using a half moon file, smoothed it out.

The final hole after filing. Nice and round huh :D

Ok, i then stuck the fan on to the inside lid using the ever powerful and useful SUPERGLUE.

 

I then made double sure that it wouldnt bind on anything inside the case, retrospectively there probably wasnt much i could do if it did bind, other then cut/file bits of the fan housing down. Lucky for me it worked perfectly.

Now one thing that kind of worried me was that the fan wasnt on top of the heatsink assembly of the chip. So what i decided to do was make a kind of duct that would direct the cool air onto the heatsink first, and then exhaust into the rest of the case.

As you can see i have already soldered the fan to the power supply and you can see it spinning there nicely. You can see the final duct there as well. When the case is together those bits of cardboard rest lightly against the circuit board and make the duct.

Now, i put it all together and noticed that it was a bit too noisy for my liking. So what i did was solder a 100ohm resistor into the power leads, this slows the fan down nicely, while still providing enough air flow.

Notice i used heatshrink there as well. The switch circuit runs of 2.3 volts, and those wires to the fan are at 12 volts, so i had to make sure they there was no chance of a short circuit. Its one of the reasons why i put the resistor in the earth lead, so if it does touch something, it will only be 0 volts, not 12.

Final assembly and testing.

Just had to make sure that it all fitted together properly and ran nicely. It works perfectly.

So the final product?

All done!!

Final testing will be done tonight. I have to admit it is a pretty dodgy job, but it should work. The keep it simple principle.

I will also admit that the inclination to go putting lights inside this thing entered my mind, but i resisted it, cos it would have made too much work, and my adsl switch would then need lights as well, for continuity sake :)

So. thats it, not much left to mod now... i might have to put a window im my UPS hahaha

Todays experiment, SUCCESS!

27 Oct 03