I’m using the R4 without the official case, because I will be mounting the board vertically in a multi-media cabinet (basically a power distribution cabinet with venting holes in the bottom and top of the door and metal plates with holes to mount things).
Now I’m seeing relatively high temperatures on the wifi chips, around 70C, and would like to cool them better.
There are 4 additional screw holes on the board that are not used for mounting. Are those intended for a heatsink or are those just randomly there for production or testing or whatever?
I was thinking about putting one big heatsink on them, but would need to fasten it with screws somehow, because it would be quite heavy and gravity would pull it off the thermal pads.
Has anyone else tried to do this and could share their experience with me?
Edit: So basically, a heatsink like this that covers all chips, with cutouts for the two mounting screws so don’t are blocked.
I had the same idea as yours to use a breaker box. If it has standard width of 12 DIN modules, the official case will fit inside just fine. Otherwise I’d use the perforated plate as a heatsink if I was going to mount the router to it directly. Sure, it’s not as thermally conductive as aluminum, but it’s huge and the BE14 doesn’t run very hot anyways. Good thermal pads of the appropriate thickness are key here.
Thanks, but as I said, I’m going to use the board without the case.
This is how my perforated plate looks like. The box comes with four of those instead of one big one like on your case. Since the holes of the R4 didn’t match those of the plate, I had to make an “adapter”.
Now I got around 3cm of space on both sides to fit bigger heatsinks.
I remember someone on this forum mentioning that you can order heatsinks from vendors on Aliexpress custom-made to the specified dimensions and mounting holes placement.
