I use Ubuntu 26.04 with my RPi 5, and I have the latest RPi 5 firmware and Pironman 5 Max software installed. The PWM cooler fan does a great job of keeping the CPU/GPU cool, so I normally have the GPIO fans set to mode 2 (cool) profile, and they only come on when I am maxing out all four cores.
However, over the past couple of months, I have not noticed the GPIO fans coming on at all. I went into the dashboard and changed the mode to 0 (always on) and they both fired up complete with their RGB lights, so I tried an experiment: I overclocked my CPU and set the GPIO fan mode to 1 (performance) which should have the fans on at around 50°C, but although PWM cooler fan ramped up to around 75% to keep the temperature around 70°C, the GPIO fans did not come on.
Clearly the GPIO fans do work and can be activated by setting mode 0, and the software is monitoring the temperature correctly, but the software does not appear to be turning them on at the temperature thresholds.
Edit 1: in case there was a problem with the RPi 5 firmware, I flashed it back to a version from last December and it made no difference.
Edit 2: I tried to roll-back the Pironman software to 1.2.21 which I absolutely knew worked, but it would not install without errors; the earliest I could roll-back to was 1.3.7, and that did not help. I have re-installed the latest 1.3.13 version now and will wait patiently for any suggestions from a SunFounder person. I have a feeling that the glitch is somewhere between the move to Ubuntu 26.04 and whatever changes have been made to the latest Sunfounder software.
Any help much appreciated!
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I could not seem to make another edit to my post, but this is what I was going sayâŚ
Edit 3: I have not programmed in Python, but I was a C++ programmer way, way back, so I decided to look at the fans.py script in the virtual environment. There is a section that I can see reports into the log file if a PWM fan is supported: âPWM Fan is supported, sync all other fan with pwm fanâ. Mine is, so that python script reports that message in my log file.
However, when I looked at the code that deals with the temperature thresholds (modes) for the GPIO fans further down the script, the algorithm triggered if âPWN fan supportedâ is âtrueâ looks like it tries to set the state (on/off) of the GPIO fans depending on what the system-controlled PWM fan has been set to (the âsyncâ part). I may have totally misread that, but the algorithm used does not look right, and that may be the reason that the settings in the dashboard controlling GPIO fan temperature-dependant settings are not behaving as they should and only âalways onâ overrides that.
As I say, I might be wrong, but that extra level of cleverness (syncing) appears to be new and may be the bug.
Thank you for your detailed investigation and patience.You are absolutely right. After testing with Ubuntu 26.04, we were able to reproduce the issue you described. We sincerely apologize â this was a bug in our software, which has now been fixed.
To update your Pironman 5 Max software with the fix, please run the following installation command again:
curl -sSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sunfounder/sunfounder-installer-scripts/main/pironman5/install.sh" | sudo bash
Please let us know if the issue persists after the update.
Good afternoon
Thank you so much for fixing this; it works perfectly now. Thank you also for your kind words, albeit I did not spot the exact area that you fixed which was that in the old version of fan.py, although 5 GPIO_FAN_MODES had been defined, only 4 FAN_LEVELS had been defined; I can see that you have added the 5th FAN_LEVELS definition now (FULL) and adjusted the low, high and percent values accordingly.
One other minor fix you might consider: the new install script, which now asks which Pironman product the user is installing for, looks really polished now, so well done to the team; however, the script adds both âinfluxdata.listâ and âinfluxdata.sourcesâ to â/etc/apt/sources.list.dâ, which causes âsudo apt updateâ to generate a large number of warnings like this:
Latest Ubuntu and other Debian-based distros use the newer â.sourcesâ format, so I have just deleted the â.listâ file which fixes the warning for me. You might get other users worrying about this long string of warnings [which takes a bit of searching to find out how to fix], so you might like to just do a version check on the distro to add either the âinfluxdata.listâ or âinfluxdata.sourceâ rather than both.
Once again, thank you so much for your help! This was sorted really quickly, so I am very impressed.
Very best wishes, Nick
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Thank you for your detailed feedback and for the helpful suggestion.We will correct this in the next version. Your input is much appreciated.
