“As a fan, works great. Issue with it is the mounting/connection. I could never get a proper connection so the python examples would not work. Even bending the pins on the Pi didn't work for me. So now I have an always-on fan on a Pi with bent pins.”
“Unfortunately the Fan SHIM did not initially work with my RPi 4 with Ubuntu - it seemed to interfere with the boot process - booting from SD card. Remove the Fan SHIM and the OS boots OK. Note also that the Fan SHIM seems to work OK when booting Raspbian.
Following feedback from Pimoroni I got this to work by disabling the UART in one of the config files in /boot/firmware. The relevant config file name seems to be different for different versions of Ubuntu - for me it was syscfg.txt
The code to turn the fan on/off seems to work OK, but I'm not convinced it is a good idea. The electricity to run the fan constantly amounts to £1.05 per year for me. I get the feeling that the thermal stress will be less by running the fan constantly rather than a cycle of allowing the board to heat up and then cooling it down. I have another Pi with an acrylic case and fan built in that runs constantly and was the same price as the fan shim alone - half the price of the Pibow Ninja plus fan shim, so I think this should be a lower price especially if bought together with the case.
It cools really well though in the Ninja case, and excellent rapid responses I get from Pimoroni makes them a preferred place to purchase from.”
Ahoy Nick! Have you tried disabling UART - I believe it's on by default in Ubuntu. Forum thread here > https://forums.pimoroni.com/t/fan-shim-will-not-allow-rpi4-to-boot-solved/12229/8
“Please be mindful that the temp sensitive fan speed header won’t work as that will disable the sound in Picade. They use the same GPIO. Otherwise - really good product”
