WIP: Raspberry Pi Pico Fan Controller

This project aims to create a fan controller based on an RP2040 / RP2350 that can be hand-soldered by anyone and will run on any machine! It uses only the bare minimum of through-hole solder parts to give you:

• 3 thermal sensors
• 6 controllable 12V PWM fans

The idea came up when I was building my home server with consumer parts and realized again that most onboard fan controllers don't work properly on Linux.

The project consists of three parts:

• The TinyGo RP Pico firmware, found in firmware
• The Golang fan controller, found in fancontroller
• The KiCad PCB design, found in kicad

Firmware

The firmware is waiting for commands over the serial usb interface, documented the json commands and responses json-schema.

Hardware Prototype

Here are some pictures from my prototype PCB that I’m using for development:

TODOs

The project is still in development, I still have a couple of TODOs.

• Incomplete documentation
• Integrate lm-sensors readings
• Emulate as hwmon device on Linux
• Auto-detect which fans / sensors are connected
• Show fans / sensors as disconnected in fan-controller
• New PCB revision with rear-facing USB port
• Create BOM