Beat the heat with Motorola car mount

[stark23x]

Given that my Droid is overclocked, and sometimes I forget to drop the speed before I mount it and start a Nav session, and that I like to keep it charging while I drive (smartphone battery life, amirite?), I sometimes find a very hot Droid in my car. I've experienced some reboots when the battery temps (I assume the CPU also, but we can't get a measure on that with Froyo yet) soared as well. SO...I figured since I can't find a way to mount it in front of my A/C vent, I need to get some kind of airflow going. I grabbed my drill and a 1/8 inch bit and this is what happened:

Yes it could be porettier, but I don't see the holes when the phone is in, so... I also made sure that four of the holse in the little snap-in plate aligned with holes in the back to air will move inside the hollow space behind the plate.

It seems to be helping quite a bit. I could easily reach 60-65 degrees Celsius before, now I rarely see 50. If I remember to under-clock back to stock speed, I hover around maybe 40-45ish.

You just have to be careful to not drill any of the important bits like the tabs for the plate to around the magnet. Unless you want to remove the magnet, that is. In which case, drill away!

 

[JhankG]

Very cool. I may give this a try.

 

[DJTURNz]

You should have drilled out the spot for the camera to see thru as well.

 

[icculusX]

You should have drilled out the spot for the camera to see thru as well.

Good idea, however wouldn't the camera get mostly blocked by the suction cup?

 

[Asterisk]

I can't see the picture to see what to do cause my Droid gets very hot as well. This is a very good idea and I can see myself trying this soon.

 

[hemidroid]

Nice Job! Another idea, my Droid was getting hot to the touch in the Florida sun so I modded the mount and attached it to the ashtray insert. This did not destroy the car mount, just unscrewed and rescrewed. Mucho cooler in it's new location, looks and works good.

 

[DanDroidX]

I combined the suction cup stick from my universal phone mount, 12" long bend stick thing, with my the Droid car mount and made it so it hangs right over one of my AC vents in my Civic. It keeps it chilled while I have the air on. I think I may break out th dremel and try the perforations too. It looks righteous.

 

[jbwiden]

They sell a generic vent mount at radio shack that works extremely well. No buttons are obstructed and the CPU area stays cool because it sticks out past the top of mount

 

[vatothe0]

Seems like a lot (more than zero) of work when you can just use SetCPU and enable the profiles to automatically change the clock speed.

 

[MissLlil]

I bought a cheapo universal GPS car Dock from Marshalls to use for my droid.

It was 10 bucks and snapped onto the air vents. This might be something you'd be interested it. Just make sure the droid actually fits, I opened the packages to test and the first one I tried out was too wide to stand it straight up but too skinny to lay the phone longways

I'm cheap and was very happy to avoid the $30 car dock from verizon.

 

[barrettrking]

Pretty cool idea. I was on a lengthy drive for work and had my car charger plugged in along with leaving the hard shell on my phone. Man, was it cooking two hours later! I popped the case up and held the phone in front of the a/c to cool it off!

 

[iDr0id]

amazon has a cheap mount for the droid that actually clips into your air vent. Has anybody tried it out?