start your week off with a smile thanks to the video [Sammy] put together. It shows off the cooling rack he made for his network equipment. The project was developed out of necessity as the summer weather was causing his modem and router to heat up and at some point one of them would just shutdown and refuse to work again for hours. We haven’t run into this ourselves but it’s good to know that over-temperature safeguards have been built into the equipment.
His solution was to build a rack that offers fan cooling above and below the two pieces of equipment. as with most of his projects, we think making the video (embedded after the break) was half the fun. In addition to playing around with a turntable for some extra special camera effects he gives us a good view of the overall build. The base includes spacers and velcro strips to hold the equipment in place above a pair of exhaust fans. The standoffs at each corner of the rack suspend a second pair of fans above the equipment. but it wouldn’t look nearly as good without some custom LED effects thrown into the mix.
This is purely timer-drive. It’s a plug-in module that uses mechanical timing to switch mains. but some creative circuitry (or a small microcontroller) could implement temperature-based switching instead.