Cooling a hot blooded TDP-100
With the heating issues this TDP was facing, I decided to go another route. Yes, the original design was cool (I thought, anyway) but was way over designed in some ways with a focus that wasn’t on the area that needed to be cooled. With a single fan, and orientated to the center of the TDP case, she still got plenty warm. I could cool things off by sliding the cooler to the left, with half the cooler hangin off the side of the OcCo, looking pretty ridiculous. Then, ironically, I saw a news article about the plans to restart Three Mile Island and thought, even in my case it’s not functional, nuclear cooling towers look cool. So after a little time spent with my design software I came up with this:
Remember, My first design attempt was a two layer manifold with a 60mm 12vdc fan powered internally for now. Test fit wasn’t fantastic, and I’m kind of glad I forgot to take a picture. The second design was approximately the same size, with a little creativity added to the mix. Now, whether that is good or bad is purely subjective. Actually it’s not. We’ve moved on…
The new design is vastly different, takes up much less space and is much easier to deal with and hella quicker to print. But, like all design work, there were variations, which you can see below. The first version was done in crystal clear PLA+ and is using the 60X20 12vdc – powered from the CoCo board at TP’s 9 & 4 (gnd). This was a very effective design for cooling whether it was blowing or sucking the air. BTW, the versionS are right to left, oldest to newest.
The middle and the left above differ from each other by the locating pin design that fitS in the MIDDLE COOLING slot on top of the case. Very thin and fragile for the middle version (orange) – redesigned to be a little beefier for the red version on the left above. Also, the orange version didn’t leave any clearances for switching the fan orientation from suck to blow – which you can see the new design to the right.
Aside from listening to 8-bit JUKEBOX music, I do other various things trying to guage the heat build up inside the CoCo. Nothing scientific, just by use of the handometer on the case. To the left, you can see a wireframe image of the space shuttle in a demo on the COCOSDC image. I let thsi run for hours and the case is barely warmer than room temp.
So for this particular cooling need, I think I’m done. I have a solution that’s quiet and works very well at keeping my TDP cool. Now, for my actual CoCo units, I may end up designing something similar, but the answer to that will not be known until I’m done with this one for the time being. With that, I’ll leave you with two things: a video of the cooling tower being printed, and a preview of my next major project I’m currently working on…
Till next time, stay safe and happy cocoing!
