[gijoe50000]

I'm thinking about putting a fan in behind my display to keep it cool, but I'm just trying to decide the best place to splice it in. Obviously not a permanently hot wire..
I have the RD4 setup, the one where the stupid orange display gets hot and then fades out. I could just buy a new display for €40-€60 but that's not really much fun. I bought a cheap €10 display for a 207, it worked fine but it was really primitive and lacked features.

I know that the RT3 has a fan so there must be somewhere it plugs into, anyone know where that is?

I suppose I could wire it into the ignition, or into the display itself but it may suck all the amps from the display, not sure. The fan I have is an old xbox fan I had lying around.. 12v 0.40A. I can get it to fit perfectly behind the display after cutting out a little plastic bulge that was in the way. Once I find a good power wire I'll mess around with resistors to get a comfortable noise\cooling level. Might even throw a potentiometer on to it for on-the-fly cooling.

So, any recommendations for a suitable power source?

 

[gijoe50000]

Ok, don't even bother. Just done it there, and it only makes a slight difference, if any. I also put a potentiometer in and had the fans up to pull power, and I even took the plastic cover off the back of the display to get more airflow through. The display is just about viewable in the 'inverse' mode alright but I wouldn't recommend going to the bother of doing it unless you're really, really bored..

I'm guessing the problem is the very front of the display, as it's still pretty warm there.

 

[gijoe50000]

Ok, so I may have been a bit hasty.

After a week or so with the fan installed and the display set to brightest and 'inverted', it seems to be a lot better. I hopped into the car today after the sun was beating down on it for a few hours and the display was unreadable. However after a few minutes with the new fan running the display came back fine again. So the fan actually works alright. Still a few lines on the display but nothing major, and the uninverted option is still pretty useless.

Also... before, I could feel heat coming from the display, now it's the same temperature as the rest of the dash, if not a bit cooler. I wired the fan into the ignition power supply for the radio (pin 15, I think) and just grounded it to something metal behind the glovebox. Oh and I threw a 1000 ohm potentiometer in too, and made a little hole in the glovebox for it. The potentiometer gets a bit warm if it's turned off\low so I might throw another resistor in at some stage.

So, yea, it's definitely much better than it was. I think I didn't give the fan a chance to do it's work the last day and I had the brightness on low.

It's nice to be able to see the climate temp, clock, mpg etc, even if the inverted option does look a bit ugly.