Time-Pass Engineering

It was just a month passed after warranty of my Latitude laptop had expired and cpu fan stopped cooling processor of laptop. It was good i realised it before else laptop's processor would have melted some day. Very next day of this realisation i called up Dell customer care and asked for replacement of fan, customer care executive did some troubleshooting steps with diagnostic disc supplied with laptop and came to a conclusion that fan has to replaced. He promised me to send quotation for fan in few days. After some days i got an email saying that product(fan) is EOL, so they can't supply it anymore. I was not able to use my laptop just because of this, just because i was having another laptop given by office, it was not a trouble for me.

Some weeks later i opened my laptop and took out cpu fan out. my plan was to get it repaired with help of some electrical shop, meantime i got some information about some laptop repair shops. At one shop i was told that fan can't be repaired but they can get same fan within a week, but later after two weeks shopkeeper refused as he was not able to find one for me. I tried another shop he kept fan for three days and finally called back to me saying fan is working. He asked me to get motherboard and offered me to fix this. I was not willing to leave my machine at his shop and he refused to repair it in front of me. I got the fan back and thought to get it fixed later with someone else.

Once again i called up Dell and told them it not fan but the power connector of on the motherboard which is not supplying any power to fan. Last weekend i was not having any plans, and because of hot sun outside i don't wanted to got outside my room. I checked power requirement of the fan it was 5.0 volt. With an idea of checking it i bought three pencil cell battery each of 1.5 volt. With help of a thin wire i connected battery with the fan wires and finally i saw fan in working condition. Here i started my mind's engineering capability to fix the fan. 

I connected two wires to the power connector of the fan and made it pasted transparent tape on it so that it doesn't create any short-circuit with motherboard. then i found a place to keep two batteries in inside the laptop body. I could have done some more research on the motherboard to find a suitable point where i can get desired voltage for the fan  but unfortunately i was not having any multimeter kind of device to check the voltage coming out from various available points on the mother board and also. Then i though if i fix the fan directly to the batteries it will remain in always-on situation and batteries will die soon. Now i was thinking to purchase a small switch button to control the fan. Looking at the datacard panel on the board i started mechanical engineer portion of my mind. Have a look on the pictures next.

This picture above shows switch in off state

This Picture above shows switch in on state

If you observe carefully you will see a black plastic stick purpose of stick is too push out internet datacard which i don't use in my laptop as i have USB wireless modem. I pasted one wire to this stick and other wire to the iron plate with help of adhesive, this was most time taking task as it needs to be done with complete perfection finally switch is ready, all i have to do is pull the stick out to make circuit on and push it back to turn off the circuit.

Next i carefully fixed the batteries and aligned the wires so that they don't cause any hindrance while closing the laptop. I fitted back all the components carefully and was ready to boot up my machine.

Just to keep an eye on the fan's working i enabled temperature monitoring widget on my fedora desktop. though i dont find any option to raise a sound alert in this applet, may i have sit another weekend and look into code of this fedora desk widget to have an option of setting a sound alarm when temperature goes higher than a certain point.