Cooling a hot blooded TDP-100
My TDP-100 isn’t really a TDP-100. It’s an ‘F’ board CoCo. I won an auction, the CoCo 1 was badly damaged in shipping; this gave me the opportunity to utilize a TDP-100 shell I bought from Tony Padroza a number of years ago. You’ve seen the internals of it in my audio post.
But, since I do not have a more recent image than this one, this is about it… I’ll update it later.
The issue I’ve been having is she’s definately hot blooded. The top of the case gets quite warm, so I decided to look into cooling methods. Using a fan inside the case isn’t out of the question, however I was alway intrigued by the CoCo Cooler (advertised in The Rainbow below) hanging off the side of a Color Computer. I never saw a version for the TDP-100, though.
To be perfectly fair, I can’t say I’ve ever seen one of these in the wild. Really it’s kind of ugly, but in an endearing sort of way.
This device looks like an AC powered fan, basically hanging off the side side of the original CoCo 1 style case. This looks like it would work great, and be very easy to set up being as there’s no case removal involved.
Also to be considered, with the AC power being external to the CoCo power supply, the fan isn’t adding to the load and creating more heat.
Nothing like adding to the problem you’re trying to fix!
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.
I’ll get another image uploaded later, but this version has two layers. The bottom that rests on the TDP-100 case vents has two large holes. The theory here was to use the added air pressure from the fan to help exhaust heat. Initial tests weren’t overly impressive with blowing air into the case. This might be due to where the air was being pushed in; as you can see, the fan is on the right side of the manifold and is obviously to the right of the trransformer and power supply components.
My next idea was to use the fan in sucking mode. That’s right, flip the fan so it’s blowing thru the manifold. Ironically, this seemed to have better results. My hand thermometer (handometer?) did note a slightly better cooling effect. Things were still quite toasty
By the way, as a heat generating test, I used the Musica disks on the CoCoSDC image. The disk with the billy joel songs, and played six songs on repeat for 15 minutes. Nothing scientific about it, lol.
What I found to give the best results was sliding the cooler over towards the left, closer to the transformer and power supply components (no-brainer, right?). In either suck or blow mode, this had a much more profound impact on the handometer case temp feelings. So I’m thinking a much simpler design is in order; I’m thinking a three mile island style cooling tower…
(really a damn fan inside the case will do wonders, but I over-complicate things…).
Stay tuned for part II….