Project One Smart Laptop Cooler

Hey all today i am going to use my old laptop cooler of which the fans broke to make an fully autonomous laptop cooler that adjusts his fan-speed and height to it's temperature accordingly

• Raspberry pi 4
• Breadboard
• Levelshifter
• Sound sensor
• Light dependend resistor
• LM35 temperature sensor
• Laptopstand(ventilated)
• 2 Fans (12V)
• 2 linear actuators (12V)
• linear actuator motor controller
• LCD (1602A)
• Bunch of wires
• 12V barrel jack power supply with connector end

as you can see i already put my T-breakout board, MCP3008 and level shifter on this board only my mcp3008 will do a 180 later in this project because it fitted better.

1. put your T-breakout board, mcp 3008 with the notch pointing at the breakout board, and the levelshifter on the breadboard
2. connect your ground, my breadboard has 4 independent power 'zones' so i will need to connect them and the pi to eachother

now i connected the ground to the wrong side of my mcp3008 so if you put that notch to the t-cobbler it will work

1. connect the 3.3V to the top right power zone
2. connect the 5V from the pi to the left power zone and connect them
3. connect the AGND and DGND from the mcp3008 to the ground of the breadboard
4. connect the grounds from the levelshifter to the ground of the breadboard

In this step we are going to connect the rest of the wiring for the MCP3008

1. connect the SC/SHDN pin to the SPICE0 of the T-cobbler
2. connect the DIN to the MOSI(Master Out Slave In) pin
3. connect the DOUT to the MISO(Master In Slave Out)pin
4. connect the CLK pin to the SPCLK pin
5. and lastly connect the VREF and the VDD to the left power zone(5V)

For this step we are going to connect our LM35 Temperature Sensor to our wires so that we can put them in our breadboard later

1. If you have the LM35 an you are looking at the flat side then you should
2. The left pin to GND (preferably a black cable)
3. The right pin to 3.3V (Preferably a yellow for 3.3V or a Red cable for power)
4. The middle to our A0 channel on our MCP3008

This is the audio sensor i got a envelope audio sensor that can read multiple analog inputs from a certain soundlevel, the soundsensor also got 4 wires but one of them is a NC pin which stands for non connect so we can leave that pin alone

1. Connect your red or yellow wire to the 3.3V
2. Connect your orange wire to A1 pin of the MCP3008
3. Connect your black wire to ground

Now in terms of connecting the wires to the LDR you cant do it wrong you can put the 3.3v on the right pin and the gnd on the left pin or vice versa only thing that is a bit diffrent is when you put it on the breadboard you need to connect your gnd wire to a pin (not in your power zone)and next to that pin in the same row put a resistor to ground and put a wire between the ldr gnd pin and to the A2 of your MCP3008

Now for the LCD i don't have pictures for every cable because it would be to many and i will add a wiring diagram to this page eventually.

1. Connect your power
2. Your VSS to ground
3. Your VDD to 5V
4. Connect your LED power
5. Your A pin to 5V
6. Your K pin to ground
7. Your v0 pin to a 2k ohm resistor and that resistor to ground
8. Now there is only one pin that is a bit special and that is the RS pin you can just connect that to the ground
9. Connect the rest of the pins to a GPIO port on your t-cobbler

Now in this step we will add our 12V to our left under power zone

1. Its actually very easy if you have the 12V barrel power supply with a plug ending then you just connect a black wire to the - port and a red wire to the + port
2. Connect the red wire to the + on your breadboard
3. Connect your black wire to the - on your breadboard

now i have fitted everything in my box, this is just a step to let you show my process

In this step i will explain how to make your stand complete

1. I put my fans on the most very top
2. screw them in, 2 screws should be enough
3. put your linear actuator in place, i glued it to my stand with tec7
4. Now i have created a 3D printed box which i will put on my stand near the bottom to get some more "Fresh air"

This is a step to see if you really connected all your wires correctly

This is my Normalized database, which I have put on the raspberry pi itself using MySql

now with the stand finished, the project is essentially done.

Because it's on a raspberry pi there is some code that should go with every component, but because this is out of my scope of my project you can find my code on my github page.

https://github.com/howest-mct/2022-2023-projectone-KearoL0

I hope you enjoyed this instructable and i hope you could make it!