Looking to power a fan to keep an Orange Pi 3B cool inside it's enclosure, I turned to a "power" mosfet I hadn't worked with before, the super little guy AO3400.
Rated to 30V and a fanciful 5.8A it seemed to be perfect for the job because it could "open the gate" at around 1.1V.
I designed a suitable circuit, soldered the little bits together on a SOP8 to DIP8 adapter (!!) as per below:
The design seemed to work for an LED circuit, so I boxed it up and ran it from the 5V rail of the OPi 3B.
See the result below. Please add comments on YT below the video, especially if you have a view on fan orientation!
Newbies with cool tech like me are prone to "bricking" chips which basically means you can't program the things anymore.
Different chips react differently in these circumstances. Once upon a time I invested in a High Voltage AVR Programmer for reviving ATTiny85 chips that I had unwittingly fried with poor code. And it worked a treat!
The CH32v003 peeps in their wisdom have fortunately included in their one-wire communication protocol the ability to reset and therefore un-brick a chip.
There's a little VCC dancing to make it happen, but...well, take a look...
I've had great success with the Orange Pi range over the years. I will say that I've always bought the cheap(est) option and even now I'm not sure if I'd take the plunge on an OPi 5 with all the fruit - that's a lot of dollarydoos!
In the meantime I have an OPi 3 LTS chugging away in the background on both PiHole duties as well as a Media Server - and it works great!
But recently I grabbed hold of the holy money belt and shook like crazy to purchase the following pack of goodies.
I think that this machine might end up being the new NAS and Pi-hole combo. The first thing to do is roll-my-own Armbian. I did start off with a community version of Ubuntu, which booted fine, but I had trouble copying the system over to the EMMC module - so roll your own Armbian it is!
The addition of a 1Tb NVME solid state drive should give a few options for video and music streaming - time will tell. It's my impression from reading that you could use this fast SSD option to preload or buffer video and audio from a larger HDD and thus smooth out some rough edges that occasionally appear.
Here are the stats on this little beauty - I still think it's cheap for the power and the potential, a nice mix of stats and options making it one of the more versatile units in this range.
And the video? I've tried to show the whole process from unpacking to running the desktop on the device.
