Console Cooler

In January 2022, I came down with Covid. Like so many of us have, I quarantined and started getting bored. To fill the time, I started looking for small projects to work on. One minor issue that was brought to my attention was my brother’s Xbox Series X and the ongoing war he was waging with my mom over the media center door. The Xbox Series X is a powerful console that needs a lot of cooling to reach its full potential. When enclosed in a media center, the internal ambient air heats up and over time reduces the cooling capacity available to the console. To combat this, my brother had started opening the cabinet doors and leaving them open.

I dove right into finding a solution to cool the Xbox. I decided to follow the cooling strategy commonly employed by gaming PCs where cool air enters one side of the case and warm air exits the other. I also aligned this with the intake and exhaust fans on the Xbox itself for a cohesive cooling strategy. I chose to use two 140mm 3 pin PC fans. 3 pin fans are usually considered to be “fixed speed” because there is only the fixed positive and ground voltages and a feedback rpm signal. I chose to use a MOSFET to drive the fans and left available the option to using power a MOSFET.

 

Source: Dell

 

For the mechanical side of the project, I 3D printed an interlocking housing to link together the fans and electronics while also incorporating a cable passthrough for the fan and Xbox cables.

 

Console Cooler CAD

 

For the electronics I combined an easy to integrate approach using an Arduino Nano and an I2C with the added challenge of using a power MOSFET to drive the fans. The Arduino reads a value for temperature and when it reaches a certain threshold it pulls the pin attached to the gate of the MOSFET high, allowing current to flow to the fans. In the future, I want to use what I have learned in power electronics to use a PWM pin and a custom buck converter to unlock speed control for the fan by varying the input voltage to the fan, rather than just driving it at 12 volts or 0 volts.

 

Installed Console Cooler

 

I installed the system and routed the cables and left it there while I headed off to L.A. for an internship. I had mostly forgotten about it until I suddenly remembered and took a look to see if it was still operational while I was home for winter break one year after I finished this project. I was glad to see that it was still working perfectly and the threshold was exactly where it needed to be. The fans never turned on while the console was idle, but they would spin up to provide vital cooling to keep my brother’s Overwatch 2 frames as high as possible.

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