marhop/fanslow-probook430g2

Better fan control for HP ProBook 430 G2.

Better fan control for HP ProBook 430 G2.

On my HP ProBook 430 G2 laptop running Debian or Arch Linux, the fan is much too zealous to my taste, running quite fast even when there's nearly no load on the system. These scripts take control of the fan and apply a more moderate policy. On my laptop this works better than the original fan control software, meaning that the fan runs much less, but your mileage may vary. And of course, it's nobody's fault if you wreck your hardware!

The core scripts probook_ec and fanslow are taken from https://github.com/k3mpaxl/fanspeed with no or only minimal modifications. Further information on the original scripts can be found at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2008756.

Overview of the components

The probook_ec script is used to change several hardware settings of a laptop. Useful things you can do with it include switching the fan off and resetting the embedded controller (I guess that means something like returning control of the fan to the firmware):

# probook_ec FANOFF
# probook_ec FANRST

The fanslow script monitors the temperature and sets the fan speed as needed.

The fanslow.service file is a systemd service unit file used for autostarting and running the fanslow script as a background daemon.

Installation

On Arch Linux, you can install from the AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/fanslow-probook430g2/

On other distributions, use the Makefile for installation and removal. If you are picky about your installation paths (like /usr/ vs. /usr/local/) you should probably adapt the Makefile as well as the fanslow and fanslow.service files prior to installation.

# make install
# systemctl enable fanslow
# systemctl start fanslow

# systemctl stop fanslow
# systemctl disable fanslow
# make uninstall

You can watch the script working with the usual systemd tools:

# systemctl status fanslow
# journalctl -u fanslow

fanslow-probook430g2's Issues

Improve documentation regarding precise fan control (and other suggestions)

Big thanks for this repo. However, I'd like for information to be more accessible regarding how to do precise fan control.

For anyone curious, follow along. To set manual fan speed, you do the following:

1. Install probook_ec script
2. Then the speed that you want to set the fan on should be: # probook_ec := 0x2f 0xff minus your_speed (in hex)

Also one other interesting idea is to contribute this to https://github.com/hirschmann/nbfc instead, as it holds a large database of existing laptops that support manual fan control.

Anyways, you don't have to do any of these, but I'd like for this to be more streamlined and accessible.

Again, big thanks for this.