Main: www.jr-worldwi.de/photo/              

Cooling fan for the Olympus 2040



Back to the Olympus C-x0y0 modding page

Be sure to read my modding disclaimer here before proceeding.


I got my inspiration for this project from http://www.hostultra.com/~ghonis/c2020zdeep7.htm. He attached a PC cooling fan to the base of his Olympus 2020Z. The air enters the camera through the hole where the tripod mount used to be and leaves the camera through the opened SmartMedia card cover door.
There are three things that I wanted to do differently:
I found a very small cooling fan at Conrad.de.
ordering number: 532606 - U0
size: 25mmx25mmx10mm (1"x1"x0.4")
voltage: 5V
current: 120mA
Staying with 5V was important as it can be powered off the camera battery compartment.

The matching cage can be found at Farnell.com:
ordering number: 421-8772

When disassembling your C-x0y0 make sure to remove the front cover completely from the rest of the camera. This includes remving the PC sync connector. This way dust created by the drilling will not creep into your camera.
Now hold the cooling fan onto the base of the Olympus. The small edge created by the tripod mounting area can work as a guide for placing the fan. Mark the spot where the two front holes will be drilled. Guesstimating where the air intake will be, mark where you want to drill some more holes.


For example like this.

The cooler is made to be mounted with M2 screws. However, I enlarged its holes so I could use M3 screws which are more common and it is _much_ easier to obtain nuts for it. To be able to mount the screw heads I had to remove some material from the surrounding of the mounting holes in the inside of the camera. I did that by pressing a hot soldering iron onto the screw head. The iron heats the head and the head melts away exactly the plastic that hinders a good fit.


This shows how the screws do not fit without removing material from the area around their heads.

Danger this procedures easily creates dangerous vapours. It may be better to use a small electric drill with a cutter. Then you should be careful as the cutting creates dust that is also not health-friendly.
The finished attachment looks like this:

The power is taken from the power socket decribed in this section of my page.

Well, everything that goes in, must come out. So I had to drill some more vent holes. I decided to use the compartment which houses USB, TV Out and DC power in. Drilling these holes is quite tricky, as they are located in the rear panel which is still attached to the main board via the cables of the LCD monitor:

Doing it like this the door can be closed for some kind of protection and opening the door will not create a write error. However, I must confess one huge disadvantage: The fan will blow dust into the camera. The CCD chip is fairly well shielded by a rubber seal but this modification clearly takes something away from the sturdiness of a normal C-x0y0 Zoom.

Back to the Olympus C-x0y0 modding page



This section probably applies to the following cameras:
copyright 2004...05 by jensroesner.de