Making your own fan controller /w switches?

[Gogar]

Hey i'm going to buy a ton of new kit soon.. Case will be a CM stacker.
Now i'm looking for a good fan controller.. i'll have a bunch of fans, 3x 120mm front intake 120mm exhaust cpu cooler, video card cooler, 80mm fan at the top and another one in the side panel.. that's a quite a lot right there.. 8 of them.

I hear PWM circuits introduce noise and EMI.. which kinda sucks i think.. most fan controllers use those right?.. so i'm looking for a fan controller that just let's me choose between 12, 7, 5 and 0 volt with a switch or something.. that would be perfect IMO. I haven't been able to find anything like that though.

I'm wondering if i couldn't just drill 8 holes in a faceplate of the stacker, and put some switches in there.
No clue yet what kinda switches or how to wire it up.. maybe you guys have any ideas..

I can't find any good switches with 4 positions and the pins connected so that i could make the 4 voltages. A led for each fan is probably a good idea too, so it's instantly clear that a fan is off or on.

I also had another idea, to be able to program a few profiles with dip switches on the inside, and just have one dial with 4 positions to pick the profile, such as ALL MAX, NORMAL, SILENT, NIGHT... But that's probably a lot harder

Spill the thoughts!

[Gogar]

Oh i did find a 4 positions dial that would let me make 4 voltages.. like a 3 x 4 dial:

(nicer knobs are available for them)
I could connect the outter ring up to make the right voltages on the inner pins.

12v, gnd
12v, 5v
5v, gnd
gnd, gnd

But those are rather big, and i could never fit 8 on a row.. but then again.. i could use two faceplates maybe.. i got 3 hdd cages.. that's 9 5.25 bays.. the stacker has 11 in total.. I got no dvd's or floppy drives (useless materialistic junk ) so yeah that lets me use 2 faceplates.
I can fit maybe 5 of them in a row. Great that gives me 10 controls in total.. i forgot to mention 2 fans for my ram so that works out perfectly.

[Darkfold]

That would be the way to go
The other option is to just solder a sodding big rheostat between 12V and the fan supply (looks ugly, but you can fine tune it to your hearts content :P)

[IYP]

wht bout some VRs?

[Gogar]

I'm not familiar with VRs
Could you give me a lead so i can look into it?

Ideally i'd want just one of the dials i posted a picture of above, and have that act as a profile selector.. and just configure the profiles with dips or something.. (maybe this is where a VR could come in? i dunno) Figuring out if it's possible and how i'd need to wire it up is driving me nuts lol.

[Darkfold]

Variable resistor (or a rheostat, same thing really) in line with the 12 volt line supply to the fan, so it does

(12volt)-------[variable resist]---(yellow)--[fan]---(black)---ground

then use the resistor to select the fan speed by limiting the supply. simple. (need quite a good power dissipating rating for the resistor, not sure how you would find out what rating it would have to be)

[dastt]

they arnt that hard to build yourself
http://www.cpemma.co.uk/reg.html

[Gogar]

Well i pulled it off.. i'll have more and better quality pics later.



It has one molex in, and 5 molex out. The dials have 4 settings: Off, 5v, 7v and 12v

I did run into one problem. I modified some molex to 3pin adapters so that they also had a 3pin wire that you can plug into the mainboard to supply the RPM signal.
I connected only the white and black wire. (rpm signal, and ground)
The problem though was that in 7v mode, the black wire becomes the 5v line.. and when the RPM wire was connected to the board it created a short circuit between 5v and ground.. luckily i sensed warmth in the wire quite quickly and turned everything off, but it must have been a close call
That should remind me to always test my creations for shorts with a multimeter before hooking it up.


I currently have my fans hooked up like this:

Dial 1: 3 x 120mm front intake fans (1200RPM)
Dial 2: TT Big Typhoon (stock fan 1300RPM)
Dial 3: Zalman VF700-cu
Dial 4: 120mm side panel fan (1200RPM)
Dial 5: 120mm Papst fan (2400RPM)