Nighthawk M1 custom fan

[KarmusDK]

Hi everyone. Just wanted to share a little fun setup I made out of boredom. I found a spare slide switch and a 5V fan in my electronics box and also a 2 AA batteries socket connected in serial. I soldered it together and insulated the wires in a coating and stuck it beneath an opening in the lid and positioned the small fan inside the square, where the Li-Ion battery was supposed to sit before I detached it.

It now runs on 3 volts providing a refreshing stream of air to aid the logic board in receiving its heavy loads from the telecommunications network. 🙂 You could actually make it spin faster by using three or maybe four AA batteries without burning out the circuitry (I have tested it with as high a 12V battery, and it did tolerate that for several minutes). You could even get a 9V battery and a just slightly larger fan, or you could perhaps use a tiny lithium polymer battery and make a compact solution completely inside the device itself by using up the dimensions from the hollow battery compartment!

I have noticed that the modem gets really hot when you pull torrents down for hours and some report that the DC current will decrease in case of overheating and start to drain the internal battery down to zero, while others report that using a fast charger (2.4A and up) without internal battery will less likely make their modem reboot, so for those people, this could be an adequate option to avoid removing or poking holes in the cover lid and mounting a regular sized cooling fan.

[JasonN]

Hi KarmusDK,

Thanks for sharing your custom fan for your M1! Please let us know how well that works! :]

- Jason N

[KarmusDK]

It's not as effective as a bigger sized fan with a higher voltage, so it probably only makes a very little difference, but it was mostly just a creative idea to how the heat problems could be solved. In a realistic setup you would either need to remove the cover lid to enable proper ventilation or replace it with an alternative one with holes, and you could attach the fan to the board with a little piece of double-sided bonding tape in the center area.

[KarmusDK]

You also have to frequently change batteries. Like once every hour, to keep the spin cycle high enough. Make sure you have an alkaline charger, so you don't produce more chemical waste than necessary. A PSU would certainly be a better option, or a solar panel if you're an environmentalist. As long as it's daytime, solar energy can power your fan for many hours while charging a battery to continue the rotations for the rest of your awake time.

This is something like what I was talking about. If you find one of plastic, you could do a cut out to match the shape of the router lid and use a couple of cable ties to fasten it after you have lead the power cable out through one of the lower holes in the grid.

[JasonN]

Hi KarmusDK,

Yes, understandable. You can put both together for a more effective solution. Like the fan and vented covers on a laptop. :]

- Jason N

[KarmusDK]

Just ordered this fan. It runs on USB power (5V), so it's not very useful in its current form, but I measured the box and it should fit beneath, so I'll see what I can do when I get it, perhaps tweak it a little bit to make it accept a higher input.

[KarmusDK]

In the meantime I bought this advanced power testing module, that can tamper with both the USB Power Delivery and the QuickCharge protocols to deliver a higher voltage to analog devices, that don't know how to request another input than the default 5V.

A TS-100 soldering iron fully powered by USB-C magic...So if one doesn't want to fiddle with polarity, just buy a capable power bank and force your fan to rotate faster with this nifty little thing. It is possible to go up to 12V on the USB-A plug with QC3.0. For 20V you need USB PD over USB-C.