Pi5 Fan Control Library

I finally pushed my package to PyPi (🥳) and I got version 1.0.0 out, followed quickly by v1.1.0 to fix some issues and also add some new code.

For version 1.0.0, I updated the pyproject.toml metadata with info like the author, license, and GitHub page. Then, I built using uv build and published with uv publish.

For the 1.1.0 update, I took advantage of the Pi’s native pinctrl utility to control the PWM pins of the fan myself. Although I only get binary access, that still let this version turn off the fan completely (useful for a quiet mode) or max the fan speed out (good for high temps or cleaning the fan). This also meant I had to add another function that told pinctrl to let go of the GPIO registers and give control back to the native Linux governors. I made a quick example file for this and pushed 1.1.0 to PyPi as well.

In this update, I was finally able to finish the core logic of the library and get complete coverage in my tests and examples!

I noticed that whenever I updated the config, it was appending more and more config values to the bottom of the config.txt. To fix this, I reworked the logic that I used for reading/writing to do an atomic overwrite if a config already existed. I also added a function to easily clear the fan curve config, as if my library had never touched it!

I added these new functions to my unit tests, and I also cleaned up the old ones so that they worked properly and had more thorough checks. I also went back to my examples folder and fixed all of the example scripts, adding helpful comments and print statements so that every line is clear.

Looking through the Linux/Raspberry Pi OS system classes, I was able to identify thermalzone0 and hwmonX (with X changing every time on boot) as the two folders where the data I needed to read/write would be located. I added functions to get the fan speed, profile, and CPU temps, as well as pytest unit tests to check these functions. In addition, I started making the functions that would actually affect the fan curves, although I need to do some more tinkering around with thermalzone0 and sudo permissions in particular to finish that bit up.