I'll have to snip the leads to the bottom fan
For simplicity in testing, I'd recommend just taping down the fan blade to keep it from spinning, or another low-tech method of restriction (a piece of chewed gum?). If you get some thermal throttling, it's easy to make it spin again.I would advise against that - a stuck motor can draw a multiple of the wattage that it normally draws, and thus overheat, even burn out.
Well, a piece of paper across the air intake should do the trick for testing, but I generally advise against trusting in any kind of thermal shutdown, especially if the unit is known to not have on-die temperature sensors and just measure the board/air/case temperature.
How can one read those? The usual "read temperature" command only returns one value that seems to be a board temperature, and that's the only command mentioned by the "specification".
I don't have a BFL myself, so I can't test this, but I'd be very interested in the commands for die temperature reading. Might be a useful addition to MPBM.
