Melzi Fan

thingiverse

High load on my Prusa i3 from China caused its y-axis motor to lose steps. Since the motor itself didn't feel too warm but the heat-sink on the Melzi board felt extremely hot, I chose to add a fan. A small fan would be sufficient, but the 4 small heat-sinks are lined up in a row that is longer than the width of a small fan. To solve this issue and increase cooling efficiency, I designed a tube to direct air to the heat-sinks like a CPU cooler does. Closing the space between the heat-sinks allowed me to direct airflow while leaving gaps for PCB parts. Since the X-axis motor's wires might interfere with my setup, I let the tube bend 45 degrees. This design is fully configurable, so feel free to adjust parameters to suit your board and test it as a remix.