Fanless Aspire One

This site http://onelinux.org/ have wiki, maybe we can put there the information about this hack... -- would be nice If we could recover that info we already got about that few registers...

And by the way, I just read an article about Dell Atom netbook review:
"We noticed that the Inspiron Mini 9 got uncomfortably hot when we used the notebook at length. At 100 degrees, the keyboard felt like it had a heating pad underneath it. The bottom of the system and the touchpad weren’t much better, registering 108 and 92 degrees, respectively. Dell notes that we reviewed a preproduction unit and that there shouldn’t be any thermal issues on production-level systems. We’ll update this review once we’ve received a final unit."
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptops ... spx?page=3

Seems this is a problem in all Intel Atom processors - maybe not the processor but the chipset.

 

My fan is pretty darn quiet, and I wouldn't even think of turning it off. From my experiences in the past, CPU's generate a whole lot of heat. I was building a PC a few years ago and I accidentally put the fan on the wrong way around so about a millimeter of the CPU was exposed and it cooked in about 5 seconds.

 

I just tried the new "leaked" BIOS v3304 and the acerfand script doesn't work anymore with it, the fan is always on.

 

Mines is fairly quiet isnt on much.
Unless i am playin a 3D game for more than 15 min than u hear it every now and then.

 

Confirmed. About to go and reflash with 3114.

--
Rachel

 

Yeah, the new bios disables the acerfand's functions. Please guys, can you figure this out? Since going back to old bios isn't the right way to do, since the bios almost always fixes a lot more things than just the noisy fan, although I like to think that way

 

Well, the bios update on its own didn't fix the fan issue, or I'd have been happy to keep it. acerfand was only ever meant as a stopgap.

I didn't figure out the original EC registers that acerfand used. If they can repeat that work and find us the EC regs on 3304 (also a way to read the bios version if possible), then I can update acerfand accordingly.

 

hi,

I also update the bios. but if I want to downgrade the bios, where i can get the older one?

 

It's official BIOS update? where is the change log? What are the benefits of this new version?

 

Yes, it is an official release. Changelog after the 3114:

 

Using the new BIOS (3304) I've tinkered with the acer_ec.pl script and I've found out the following:

this stops the fan momentarily, and then it begins to blow at full blast:
acer_ec.pl := 0x55 20

returns the fan to automatic control:
acer_ec.pl := 0x55 00

Writing 1f to the register as mentioned in the tutorial apparently does nothing now with this new BIOS.

Can anyone confirm these results? Is it worth trying to write different values to the same register to see if they have different effects?

Edit.
0x2f seems to turn off the fan permanently, but the laptop turns itself off after a while

 

Setting the register 0x55 to value 0xaf seems to disable the fan without any side effects. Set it to 0x00 to re-enable the fan.

 

Hi tolyen!

That sounds very fine!

Can others confirm this, before i provide an upgrade for the AA1 Fan Control for Windows?

Thank you!

 

Meanwhile, here's a quick'n'dirty howto for trying this out with the acerfand script:

In line 71 change

Code:

FAN_CMD_OFF=1f

to

Code:

FAN_CMD_OFF=af

and in line 96 change

Code:

        if [ "$RAW_FAN_STATE" == "0x1f" ]; then

to

Code:

        if [ "$RAW_FAN_STATE" == "0xaf" ]; then

 

I have tested this and it seems to be working. Thank You!

 

I've had my AA1 for a couple of weeks and the fan noise was one of the two things that irritated me about it. I finally got round to downloading and running these tweaks (thanks folks). I just read this whole thread as I thought the last BIOS fix had addressed the fan problem, but it seems that it hadn't. I'm happy to provide a GUI for this (certainly in Linux).

Please let me know if people would still like a GUI front end to these apps. I don't intend to re-implement the work done by Rachel et al., just to provide a GUI that would download the files from a URL, run both acerfand and temp top, and allow them both to be killed. I'm not planning on this to be run automatically on startup, although when the GUI starts it could check if acerfand is running and just use that. Then the GUI would only be responsible for reporting the output of temptop and killing autofand.

Also, before I start on this can people suggest what they'd like the GUI to do before I start on it? Also if anyone can point me to any xfce resources that show how I can minimize the app to the systray then I could try to implement that too. I would hope that is just a question of setting some xml somewhere rather than making C API calls.

Bernard

 

I was thinking about writing a GUI for this too. Writing a simple Python app (using gtk) that minimizes to tray shouldn't bee too hard.

Here are some basic plans I thought about:
* When minimized it should display the temps in tray icon (I don't know if that's possible to do in numeric values, but at least an indication of the temps)
* When left right clicked it displays a menu where it is possible to select fan control using acerfand or the normal fan operation, and a properties option
* Selecting the properties option displays a configuration window, where it is possible to tweak the settings (the trip points, whether to display the temps in C of F etc.)

 

I would strongly suggest checking out the PyGTK sample apps.

 

I would put my energies on creating an easy and simpler installer. And something that uses less as possible AA1 resources, as memory and processor.

Fan should work correctly without any noise, no one would be needed to be worried about that, so, having a GUI or something that is giving always information about fan is not productive, IMO.

I am very happy with actual solution, also this fan issue did take me a lot of time and this changes in BIOS just take more time :-( -- where it shouldn't!

 

Forgive me for asking, this might be a silly question.... but, are there different versions of the AAO internal fan? I have the A110 SSD, and the only time I can hear the fan is if I stick my ear right beside the vent, if not I hear no noise from the fan at all. But after going thru this thread, there seems to be alot that has this problem. Maybe ACER has changed the fan on the later units? :?: