All that is needed is a small heatsink to slightly decrease the thermal resistance to ambient air, to stay below the thermal throttling threshold.
Anything more complicated than that is a pointless exercise in pointlessness.
> Heatsinks will generally shave 5-10°C off the highest temperatures you encounter, which is significant, but you still need to have air moving across the heatsink for it to do anything. This means either a fully open Pi (great for testing or tinkering, not so great for a semi-permanent installation), a well-ventilated case (with slots or holes in the bottom and top to allow natural convection), or a fan. So not a bad choice, and they're so cheap you should probably stick them on any Pi you can... but heatsinks alone won't solve Pi cooling problems.
If he'd mounted his Pis' GPIO parallel to the ground, heatsink fans perpendicular to it, he would have found his missing convection with or without a heatsink.
This is what I do, and mine haven't reported >45`F ambient under peak load in a passively ventilated area. There is no issue with heat removal with enough air space.
I got the flirc usb dongle for remotes at the same time, since I thought I'd want it (my pi is a media center) and there was a discount at the time if you bought both it and the case.. I've been far less impressed. It's a great idea in theory, but in my experience there was enough flakiness/delay with each button press, especially with Kodi for some reason, that it was basically unusable. Also, their utility for programming the dongle did not run well on the pi itself (it stores configuration on-device so you don't need to program it from the device you'll be using it on), and the install process involved setting up a repo that is served over http and does not have an associated gpg key, which gave me a bad feeling (although overall it felt more like a startup flying by the rest of its pants than anything malicious). I am somewhat hopeful that with more time/polish these issues will be fixed in software, but can't currently recommend it.
Note that it's clearly an injection-molded aluminum top-half and the bottom-half is plastic, just used to keep the dust out.
I would describe it as simple and elegant; fit for purpose.
Otherwise I'm quite happy to have a full passive cooling config, as currently my RPi home server must live in the kitchen/dinning room area due to space constraints.
What a pity that there's plastic on the bottom.
For home/hobby use this doesn’t matter too much but you typically want to run as hot as allowable. It’s a win-win since small heat sinks are cheap and don’t have any moving parts.
I have a huge heatsink on mine (40mm cube), and even without the overclock it will crank up to 80C doing long running compiles. Running it at 80C for an hour or two, the temp of everything on the board starts to approach 80C. Touching the usb ports at that point will give you a surprise.
So, I added a small 20mm fan, and set the profile to kick on at 60C, which generally keeps the soc thermals in the 60-70C range. No throttling, and still no noise because with that large of a heatsink it doesn't take much air to cool it.
Add in a couple hundred Mhz of overclocking and that fan stays on pretty much all the time.
The current supported solution is boot from read only file system on SD card, overlay file system with writes to the USB drive.
The foundation plan to add support back but for now only supported on Pi 3 and earlier.
I use Samsung Evo cards and haven’t had an issue with them either. My problem is one of confidence. I have no data to suggest that these cards won’t just hard fail at some point in the next five years. Simply doing better than their competitors in the micro SD card space is not good enough.
Anyway, Samsung Evos didn't hard fail for me. They just stopped executing writes (without reporting any errors). So your system seems to work (for a while), but after reboot it's back to where it was previously. It's a pretty stupid way to handle end-of-life condition for the card. I wish samsung decided to report write failures instead of simply ignoring the writes and reporting success.
With an overclock, even a FLIRC would throttle when running our full unit test suite. A 30% reduction in unit test runtime is nothing to sneeze at and I certainly didn't want to downclock to 600-800MHz due to throttling. An ICE Tower was a lifesaver.
one makes sense, the other is hubris.
I'm old school when it comes to overclocking. Stability and sustainability matter to me. I don't always run all cores full-on for hours, but when I do, I want a cooling solution that's up for the job.
That makes me think a lot before choosing passive or active cooling.
The Flirc case-as-heatsink one seems good tho, and on-line with your statement
It is good for things like reading a sensor and sending it to some server, but so are ESP32s which are cheaper. You are paying a heavy price to get video output and Linux compatibility. In the current era, it's a bad microcontroller (expensive!) and a bad desktop computer (slow!). When it came out, most people were using $25 MCU boards, so $10 extra to run Linux was a great deal. These days, a massively more capable MCU dev board can be had for $4 (if you want free 2 day shipping, less if you can wait).