RaspberryPi Heatsink

This might become a series because I am trying to find some results.

Electronics temperature is not an exact science. Yes failures happen when temperatures hit an absolute max, but you can still have stress on electronics based on how long it is “hot”. For example: a device operating at temperature_ambient=25C will outlast a device operating at ambient=25C.

My philosophy is to keep things as cool as conveniently possible. Which is why the Pi is frustrating at times. There’s no heatsink. It’s a chip in the center of the board and that’s it. No fins, no large pads radiating heat away.

And it’s not cool to your finger either. It’s surprisingly warm to touch. Of course the next step is to find the temperature of the device. Try running a command like this:

/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp

My apartment is currently ~16C. My Pi0 stashed in the near vicinity of an access point is reading 32.0C. It’s not a perfect measurement because the accuracy of the chip varies in 0.5C steps. I will have a cron job set up eventually and clean up the data in python for the next blog post. Either way, it is still has a temperature rise of 15C above ambient.

I have another Pi that is in my living room (where I am getting the ambient temperature measurement). This Pi has a heatsink with the Arctic Silver Thermal Adhesive product and a small aluminum heatsink from Alibaba. It has temperature readings of 29.3C, still temperature rise of 15C above ambient.

Some factors that "may" be related:
* Pi1 is running a CUPS server.
* Pi1 is crammed into a corner next to the printer.
* Pi2 has no peripherals plugged into it

Questions left open:
* Pi1 has thermal adhesive, maybe it's not applied well?
* Pi1 has adhesive on the plastic body "chip top", maybe thermal resistance from the die to the top is too high to get benefits?
* How is the measurement done for the temperature in the Pi's?
* Is it worth having some temperature sensors to monitor the temperature in my apartment to have a good baseline to compare the Pi measurement to?