ESP32 Fan Controller

A small KiCad board to keep my home server cabinet cool. 4 PWM fans, 4 temperature probes, one ESP32.

Why this exists

My home servers live in a small cabinet, hidden inside a piece of furniture I built around them. It is a credenza with a stone top, a perforated metal grille set into that top so the warm air can escape upward, and cane mesh side panels so fresh air can come in from below.

The room itself has air conditioning, but the cabinet does not. Without something actively pushing the warm air out, it just stacks up under the stone. So I needed a way to manage the airflow.

I started with two breadboard prototypes (see How I got here). The first one was just about understanding the temperatures: where to put the probes, where it actually gets hot. The second one was for the fans, to see how they really move the air through that perforated stone grille.

Once both questions were answered, I designed this PCB. It is a small two layer board, all through-hole so I can solder it by hand on a Sunday afternoon, around €14 in parts. It runs ESPHome, which means it shows up directly in Home Assistant without writing any firmware.

The board is now soldered, mounted at the back of the cabinet, and the firmware in firmware/fancontroller.yaml keeps the two pairs of fans (one per side of the cabinet) under thermostatic control. A short press on the on-board button toggles between auto and manual; the yellow LED reflects that state.

Contents

• Features
• Hardware overview
  • ESP32 GPIO map
• Firmware (ESPHome)
• How I got here
• Build one yourself
• Repository layout
• Roadmap
• Discussion
• License
• Thanks

Features

• 4 independent PWM fan channels (designed around Noctua NF-A14 PWM, but any standard 4-pin PC fan works)
• 4 tachometer (RPM) inputs, open-collector, with on-board pull-ups to 3.3 V
• 4 DS18B20 1-Wire temperature probes on a shared bus (single 4.7 kΩ pull-up)
• Single 12 V external input. An on-board MP1584EN buck module generates the 5 V for the ESP32
• Per-fan PTC fuse and a TVS diode at the 12 V input, for protection
• I²C expansion header (3.3 V / GND / SDA / SCL)
• Two indicator LEDs: a green one for power (lit when the 5 V rail is up) and a yellow one for status (driven by GPIO 2)
• A small tactile button for boot / user input, shared with GPIO 0
• Everything through-hole, so it can be hand-soldered without a reflow oven
• Bare board, 155 × 85 mm, with M3 mounting holes

Hardware overview

Block	Component
MCU	ESP32 DevKitC V4 (AZDelivery, 100 % Espressif layout)
Power	External 12 V / 2 A PSU, then on-board MP1584EN buck to 5 V
Fans	4 Noctua NF-A14 PWM, plugged into 4-pin headers
Sensors	4 DS18B20 waterproof probes on screw terminals
Protection	1.5KE15A TVS on the 12 V input, 4 MF-R050 PTC fuses on the fans
Enclosure	No enclosure for v1, just M3 mounting holes on the bare board

PCB is two-layer, 155 × 85 mm, 1.6 mm thick.

ESP32 GPIO map

Connector	Side	PWM (out)	Tach (in)
J3	Right	GPIO 32	GPIO 35
J4	Right	GPIO 33	GPIO 34
J5	Left	GPIO 25	GPIO 39
J6	Left	GPIO 26	GPIO 36

Pin	Use
23	1-Wire bus (DS18B20 probes)
21 / 22	I²C SDA / SCL
2	Status LED (D3 yellow, R6 470 Ω)
0	Boot / user button (SW1)

The probe on J8 covers the left fans (J5 + J6), the probe on J9 covers the right ones (J3 + J4). All four DS18B20 sockets (J8–J11) sit on the same 1-Wire bus, so the assignment is by ROM address in the YAML.

Firmware (ESPHome)

The shipped firmware is firmware/fancontroller.yaml. It exposes, in Home Assistant:

• Two fan controls (Left Fans, Right Fans), each driving that side's two fans in lockstep, plus an individual RPM sensor per physical fan (four in total, so a single seized fan is still visible)
• Two temperature probes (Left Temp, Right Temp) with their DS18B20 ROM addresses pinned
• A single Auto Cooling switch and three Number entities (Cooling Setpoint, Fans Off Below, Fans Full Above)
• A Restart button and a User Button binary sensor for the on-board SW1

When Auto Cooling is on, each side runs the same linear ramp on its own probe:

T ≤ Off Below            →   0 %     (silent)
Off Below < T < Setpoint →   0 → 60 % (gentle correction)
Setpoint ≤ T < Full Above → 60 → 100 % (aggressive)
T ≥ Full Above           → 100 %     (max effort)

The setpoint sits inside the band on purpose, so a stable cabinet parks the fans at around 60 % instead of oscillating between full speed and off. All three thresholds are editable live from HA; defaults are 24 / 27 / 30 °C.

The on-board button toggles Auto Cooling on a short press, and reboots the ESP32 on a 3 s+ hold. The yellow LED follows Auto Cooling: on in auto, off in manual.

Autonomous by design

The control loop runs entirely on the board, not in Home Assistant. That is deliberate. Each server already manages its own temperature through its own fans; this controller's job is to keep the enclosure itself in range, and it has to keep doing that even when nothing is around to tell it to.

Home Assistant here runs on one of my Kubernetes nodes, which lives in the very rack this board is cooling. Relying on it to cool the rack it runs in is a chicken-and-egg problem: if that node is the one overheating, HA could be the first thing to go down. So the thermostatic logic lives on the ESP32 itself. If HA is unreachable, the board keeps reading its probes and driving the fans on its own, the servers keep handling their own thermal management, and everything stays under control independently.

The result is layered, autonomous cooling instead of a central brain that could take itself down and put the other nodes at thermal risk. Home Assistant is for visibility and live tuning, not a dependency for the rack to stay cool.

The build / flash / dashboard commands are wrapped in a Taskfile.yml. With Task installed (brew install go-task):

task               # list available tasks
task config        # validate the YAML
task upload        # compile and OTA-flash fancontroller.local
task flash-usb PORT=/dev/cu.wchusbserial8330   # first-time USB flash
task logs          # stream logs over the network
task dashboard     # local ESPHome dashboard on :6052

Before the first flash, copy firmware/secrets.example.yaml to firmware/secrets.yaml and fill it in (Wi-Fi, API key, OTA password). secrets.yaml is git-ignored.

How I got here

Before committing to a PCB, I validated the design with two breadboard stages.

Stage 1, temperature monitoring with Home Assistant

I started with an ESP32 LoLin board and two DS18B20 probes, flashed with ESPHome and added to Home Assistant. The question for this stage was simple: what does the temperature actually do in the server cabinet? It gave me the baseline graphs that justified active cooling, and it told me where the probes should sit (intake, exhaust, ambient).

The ESPHome YAML I used is kept here for reference: docs/stage1-lolin32-esphome.yaml. Shared 1-Wire bus on GPIO 4, two dallas_temp entries by 64-bit address.

Stage 2, the fan bench

For the second stage, I drove a fan directly from a separate breadboard, to actually measure how the airflow influences the temperature. Fan position, speed versus Δtemperature, how fast the cabinet responds. This is where I confirmed that the Noctua NF-A14 was the right fan, validated the PWM strategy, and figured out the per-fan power budget.

The PCB in this repository is the consolidation of both stages: 4 probes (intake, exhaust, two ambient) and 4 PWM-controlled fans on a single board instead of breadboards.

Build one yourself

1. Order the bare PCB. Any fab works, I used Aisler. You can upload kicad/esp32-fan-controller.kicad_pro directly, or export gerbers first if your fab needs them.
2. Order the parts, around €14 excluding VAT and shipping. The quick-paste block in bom/ORDER.md is verified against live Farnell France stock. Paste it into Farnell's Quick Paste / Multi-Add tool. The full BOM with notes is in BOM.md.
3. Pre-set the MP1584EN buck module to 5.00 V before soldering it in. Apply 12 V on its input with a bench supply, and turn the trimpot until the output reads 5.00 V.
4. Hand-solder. All through-hole. The order I would suggest: passives, then diodes and LEDs, then sockets and headers, then screw terminals, and finally the ESP32 socket.
5. Power-up check. 12 V on J1, confirm 5 V at the M1 output pin, then plug in the ESP32. Watch the polarity at J1: D1 is a 1.5KE15A TVS, so a reversed wire short-circuits the input through the diode.

6. Flash ESPHome. First time over USB, after that over the air:

   cp firmware/secrets.example.yaml firmware/secrets.yaml   # fill in Wi-Fi etc.
   task flash-usb PORT=/dev/cu.wchusbserial...              # initial flash
   task upload                                              # subsequent OTAs
   

   Details in Firmware (ESPHome).

Repository layout

.
├── kicad/                            # KiCad 10 project (schematic and PCB)
├── firmware/                         # ESPHome YAML for the v1 board
│   ├── fancontroller.yaml            # Shipped firmware
│   └── secrets.example.yaml          # Template for secrets.yaml (git-ignored)
├── bom/                              # BOM CSV and ordering sheets
│   └── orders/                       # Generated distributor cart CSVs
├── docs/
│   ├── images/                       # Photos, schematic renders, screenshots
│   └── stage1-lolin32-esphome.yaml   # ESPHome config used on the temperature prototype
├── BOM.md                            # Human-readable BOM with notes
├── Taskfile.yml                      # `task config / upload / logs / dashboard`
├── LICENSE                           # MIT
└── README.md

Roadmap

Next

• Replace the missing right-side fan (J4) once the second NF-A14 arrives
• Long-term temperature graph in Grafana, to see how the auto-cooling curve actually plays out over a week

Later

• An actual enclosure for the PCB. The CamdenBoss CNMB/9 DIN-rail kit is a candidate, the board is already short-edge-connector friendly
• A v2 silkscreen polish, based on what I learned during assembly (polarity marks on J1, clearer pin-1 on the fan headers)

Done

• ✅ Schematic, ERC clean
• ✅ PCB layout, DRC clean, 0 violations, 0 unconnected
• ✅ Bare PCB ordered (Aisler)
• ✅ BOM verified against live Farnell stock
• ✅ Components ordered (Farnell)
• ✅ Board assembled and brought up on the bench
• ✅ Mounted in the cabinet, three fans and two DS18B20s live
• ✅ ESPHome config shipped: two per-side fan groups (4 PWM channels, 4 RPM sensors), 2 temp probes, thermostatic auto-cooling, button + LED status

Discussion

Shared and discussed here:

• r/esp32
• r/homeassistant

License

MIT, see LICENSE. Hardware design files are released under the same terms, so feel free to fork, modify, fabricate and share.

Thanks

• The KiCad team for the EDA suite
• Espressif for the ESP32 and the DevKitC reference design
• AZDelivery for an affordable ESP32 DevKitC V4 clone
• ESPHome, which turned the Stage 1 prototype into a one evening job
• openotters, which I used as a template for this README