Hi guys, my name is Sam and today we're going to look at installing a fan and heatsink into your new NES Pi case. Now we've only just got these in there from a brand called Retro flag and they're one of the best cases I've seen to put a Raspberry Pi in, running an emulator so traditionally retro PI and it sits on your you know on your TV and your entertainment unit your bedroom and looks really nice it's really compact, but you do want to give your pie a little bit of extra cooling when it's running emulators, otherwise it can start getting a little bit hot. So, what we're going to do is take a look at the best way to do this the fan and the heatsink that I would recommend and how to install them because there are a few tricks.

So, the first thing we're going to do is install the fan, now you will need a few tools for this I've got a Phillips head screwdriver, I've already got the screws off the case but if you've already got a screwed in, you'll need that to take the screws out, I've got a very fine flathead screwdriver here, see that, very fine. I'm going to be using that for dismantling some of the header connections and I've just got a pair of Needle-nose pliers, which are always handy.

So take your fan out of the case, I've put a link in the tutorial for the fan I would recommend so check that out there and the heatsink as well and I've recommended this one very specifically for two reasons. First of all you'll notice when the fan clips in it's actually got some clips and this is the perfect height, for any less you're going to have to screw it in which can be a bit fiddly if you don't have the exact right screws anymore and it's not going to fit and also it has standard female a header connector, which has the correct crimp pins that we need. So, looking at the case if you've already got it powered on you'll know this this isn't a case run-through by the way it will actually get it more of a hands-on in-depth look at the case itself. That's another tutorial so check that one out, but it's powered by the GPIO pins microUSB connector goes through here and this goes onto the GPIO pins here and it's a two by five header. Now what this means is that's actually where the ground and the 5 volt pins are and we want to power this fan off the 5 volt pins so down here I've got pinout showing where the 5 volt pins are now there's 2. The power takes up 1 which leaves us one left fortunately, 2 by 5 head up we've got one free ground pin and one free 5 volt pin which is good. So, we need to we could of course take that you know dismantle is header, make the you know a 2 by 1 header but it's actually a bit nicer to keep that as is I'm going to take this header apart and you can do this by lifting up the plastic tabs, set up there some more plastic tabs. I've got a better picture of it here. When you lift those up be careful not to snap them out quite delicate to push your wires all the way forward and this is where it just requires a steady hand lift them up because there's a little metal tab that locks those in so you can't pull the wires out so lift both of those up so and your wires will just come free and that's what we want you've got empty female head you can keep that reuse them if you haven't snapped the pins then yet you can reuse them.

Now we're going to take this head of here, now I've got a picture of where they need to go. So you can see that the five of the red wire on the fan goes in this corner or rotate around that way so it's matching for you that top-left corner this is really important you get the polarity right, unlike a standard you know brushed motor fan you can actually just reverse the polarity to reverse the direction because it's got a little on board PCB controller. So get this in and you want to see there's a side where you've got the crimp connector and then there's a flat side the side that actually has the crimping done on it has a little metal tab and you want to make that tab facing outwards to the exposed hole the same one that we use to pry the pin off and as I said the 5 volts is going in this top left hand corner, so slide that in make sure that pins sort of press down then you'll hear it click. Yeah so you can't really hear it in fact unless you're right up close if you can feel it and then the black one is going to go in the opposite corner. You can see just in there on that ground pin whether this was intentional design I like to think so or a happy coincidence, it doesn't make it easy to install a fan. Pretty sure they would have there's no other reason to use a two by five header offset that works.

All right so now our fan is attached to the pipe. So, what we want to do is grab a power supply, it's got a micro USB power supply here it plugs into the back port in here. Unscrewed playing or anything don't need to do that yet our Pi, just sort of sits in a case like so. Plug this in and power switch on. See red light come on all right, now so case is powered up let's plug it up header in power it up and your cell phone turns on. Fantastic so now you want to check the direction of the air flow so if you put your hand against you can feel slight breeze blowing out and one side doesn't have anything because it's drawing the air in so that means we want this to be an exhaust fan we want to draw air through the case and act as an exhaust so it's pushing the hot air out of the case, which is what we want and drawing the cool air over the rest of the board in the heatsink. So that sticker side is going to be on the flat side of the top of the case. So, go ahead carve that down I don't and SD card connector here, so you have to worry about gracefully shutting down and disconnecting power for the pi. We'll go into that in a tutorial but again that's a separate video. So, check that one out. Now to click the fair name all we want to do is case Orient's that away so as I said you've got these two Clips here. Now there's a special side that makes it easy to clip it click in there's a bit of a flat side on the case and you want to put that on the back outer of clip. Now this is where it's a little bit tricky, slide the fan in all the way and then push it down so we've got one clip in already and this one bring it out here a bit more alright so what you want to do is sort of push the edge of the fan over the clip like that you can see it's now clicked in there's no wiggle room and that's going to mount really securely which is what we want. Those guys now that is just going to sit on top okay so that's the fan all assembled. You see, it's a design so it's just to the side of the main SOC, which does all the cooling which is exactly what we're after and there's enough wiggle room in the cables here that you can lie the top to the side which I like.

Now the next bit, is the heatsink so just got a standard copper heatsink and I've done some videos where I'm using a much bigger heat sink in overclocking and stress testing and things like that the truth is you don't need it heatsink that big it's great, if you want to really push your parts to the limits. But you really don't need it, this copper guy is going to cover pretty much all the surface area of that SOC, also comes with some thermal tape which is ideal. So you want to give that main SOC invisible wipe down so it's clean and free from oil and residue I've already done that. Smart approval works well if not just a wet cloth with a pinch will be better than nothing.

Now you can use thermal paste on this heatsink it does give a bit better thermal property but yeah, the thermal tape I think does the job. It's not a not a precision requirement that we need so it's got some black tape there and that goes to the SOC. This one's only slightly rectangular so it doesn't really matter which direction you oriented as long it's more or less on, you know the middle of the SOC. Push down to push too hard that make sure it's making nice contact and that's all done. That is the fan install and the heatsink make sure your wires aren't crimp there and you can see that when when you install it make sure you just push those wires out of the way, so they don't get caught in the fan it's when you start they fold over. so I bet you see that you know and there we go.

Now you can screw those in actually didn't need to use the pliers because those headers I was using for the fan are so easy. There are a couple of other I think we've got two other 30 millimetres fans on our site one comes with a different type of connector, which still has crimp connectors that are compatible at a pinch. They're not quite the same way you can push them in and they do click and they are solo but you've got to be a bit more careful not to damage the wire because they're a bit more forced to insert them. The other one the Jst connector those crimp connectors aren't compatible with these headers so you will need to get, just you know standard point one millimetres, female crimp connectors and put them on yourself. You may need to extend the wires we do so but just get this fan it's so easy to install it that way.

And that's all there is to it guys, that is installing a fan and heatsink in your Nes PI case by Retro flag, if you have any other questions put them in the comments down below and we can chat from there.

Cheers