Fan Temperature Controller

Project

In this project I will show you how to make a fan turn on when it reaches a certain temperature. The circuit will use a thermistor to measure the temperature and the fan will turn on at a certain temperature that you can set using a potentiometer. With this circuit you can also set the speed of the fan by changing the duty cycle of the PMW signal. The circuit will be powered by 12V as the fans I will be using are 12V.

I have used a 555 timer to provide a PWM signal to the fan allowing the speed of the fan to be controlled using a potentiometer. I have included the schematic to help you build the circuit. I chose to build mine on some perf board but you could build it on a PCB if you like.

Setting the temperature

The circuit uses a thermistor to measure the temperature. To make the fan turn on at the temperature you want you will need to do some simple calculations. The calculations are shown on the image. The transistor turns on at 0.7v so the Vout need to be at 0.7v for the fan to turn on. I used a 10k thermistor this means that at 25 degrees the resistance is 10k I have included a graph to show the resistance at different temperatures.

As I wanted my fan to turn on when the temperature reached 40 degrees the resistance will be 6k this means that I will need to adjust the potentiometer to 400 ohms to get above the 0.7V threshold.

Once you have set your potentiometer to the correct resistance yo can connect the fan and power the circuit with 12 volts. Now when the thermistor reaches your set temperature the fan will turn on.

Acknowledgement

I thank PCBWay & LCSC Electronics for the partnership.

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Website

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