Required parts and tools:

• Requirements to open the housing
• Pen or pointed tool to mark things on the GuruPlug housing
• carpet cutter
• drill (for example a wood spade bit)
• 2 x M2 12mm screws (or similar) and 2 screw nuts

Level of difficulty: medium

Since the GuruPlug gets quite hot, GlobalScale decided to modify the plugcomputer with a small fan to improve air flow. The only problem now is that the fan is squeezed in the only left space within the plugcomputer and it makes a lot of noise. Because the fan does not have a lot of space, the air flow is far from good. Here is some information about the fan.

Since one of the main reasons that I got a plugcomputer is it's silence and it can run in my room all day and night, the loud fan is unacceptable.

Some ideas I had to achieve better cooling were:

• Attaching heat sinks to critical parts. Because more space is needed, I would have to remove the power supply and either use an external one or pack the existing one into a external case.
• Adding more air holes to the GuruPlug case. It does not look very nice and the air flow would not be improved a lot.
• Attaching the fan (or a different fan) in a better way to have better air flow

I finally decided to take the third idea. This forum post (pictures hidden when not logged in) finally confirmed the usefullness of my idea and the author also placed the fan in a very good position where the air flow runs through all the components.

Mechanical operations

At first, I opened the GuruPlug and took out the fan (the fan power wires have a plug, so its very easy). Then I closed the housing again, fixing the it with all the screws to make sure it is properly held together (important for drilling the whole later on).

On the side opposite of the network interfaces and the USB/eSata ports, I then placed the fan and marked the location of it's holes on the GuruPlug housing with crosses. Connecting these crosses then gives the center of the fan hole.

Drilling the fan hole and the four holes for attaching the fan was the most difficult part. The drill I used for the big center hole was a wood spade bit which was a little smaller than the diameter of the fan. It is not the perfect bit to drill such a hole, but it worked good enough. I opened the small hole for attaching the fan on purpose towards the big center hole to have a location for placing the fan power wires. However, I figured out later that the hole is not necessary. Only the two top holes are needed to fix the fan to the housing. After drilling all the holes, it looked like this (already with fan):

After the drilling, I opened the housing again. To ensure better airflow, I modified the housing around the power supply a little. On the side of the network interfaces and the USB/eSata ports, I removed some of the plastic parts as seen in the following pictures. To break the parts off, I first slit the plastic slightly wit a carpet cutter:

It was then very easy to just break the parts off:

I am not sure how much better the airflow is with this modification, but at least it has some more space ;)

The final step was to attach the fan to the housing, using two M2 12mm screws.

This is it! Here is a picture how it looks like from the ouside: