Noctua releases official 3D CAD models for its cooling fans
noctua.at

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278 points

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embedding-shape

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3 days ago

62 comments

srott ・ 4 hours ago

There is Fan Show Down on yt where people are trying to beat the original Noctua fan design:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHLn2U7i45M_EXIsnqUyI...

  • zozbot234 ・ 37 minutes ago

    I'm disappointed that this is on YT, shouldn't it be on OnlyFans?

    • stavros ・ 29 minutes ago

      OnlyFans lost its purported audience years ago, when they made the decision to include human adult content in addition to fan-related content only. The adult content quickly took over and now you can barely find anything relating to fans on there.

      Reddit is a much better place for that now, and if you aren't particularly precious about documentary-style fact reporting, you're much better off browsing r/fanfiction.

      • cheschire ・ 7 minutes ago
        ・ 2 more

        I think the joke blew right past you.

        • stavros ・ 2 minutes ago

          Alas, I'm afraid that was you.

      • DaSHacka ・ 7 minutes ago

        haha true, though I don't think that's what GP meant

egeozcan ・ 7 hours ago

> To protect our intellectual property, certain features – such as fan impeller geometries – have been slightly modified while remaining visually very close to the actual product.

Noob question: If someone wants to copy their design with no respect to their intellectual property, can't they just 3D scan?

  • userbinator ・ 5 hours ago

    Unless they still have an unexpired patent on the design, it's completely legal to clone. Physical objects simply do not have the same type of copyright protection, and there is considerable precedent in making compatible components --- the most notable example being the automotive aftermarket.

    • taskforcegemini ・ 3 hours ago

      just make sure there aren't any rounded corners

    • jijijijij ・ 2 hours ago

      I believe the restriction on personal replication of patented designs is a US thing (only?). At least in Germany, you are legally allowed to make patented things for yourself or science to some capacity. The whole point of a patent is encouraging progress through disclosure of knowledge.

      The US restriction is quite mad, if you think about it. Freedom my ass.

      • bandrami ・ 19 minutes ago

        > The whole point of a patent is encouraging progress through disclosure of knowledge.

        Well, in terms of its design, the patent system was designed to reward what we now call theft of IP, by granting someone exclusive use of a technology that they would bring in from another country. Greenfield invention was an afterthought and some of the problems we face stem from that disconnect.

      • V__ ・ 2 hours ago

        You correct, you are allowed to "break" patent law in Germany, if the use is private and non-commercial. This does not encompass schools and science though.

      • bbor ・ 2 hours ago
        ・ 7 more
         

          The whole point of a patent is encouraging progress through disclosure of knowledge.
        Is it, though? It seems like the purpose of a patent is pretty direct: make money for people(/corporations...) who invent things.

        I guess you could argue that inventors would hide their designs without patents, but that's not how any industry I'm familiar with works; if they thought that obscurity was an option, they'd stick with it and just label it a trade secret!

        • bfivyvysj ・ an hour ago

          Yes, that is the purpose. It incentives R&D by providing a sanctioned monopoly on the result. The trade in return is that the public domain gets access to the trade secret after enough time has passed to provide the inventor with reward for their investment risk.

          The problem is the time has been repeatedly extended across the world to the point that society gets very little from this arrangement.

          At this point we're better off removing the concept of IP entirely.

        • PunchyHamster ・ an hour ago

          The original idea was "we protect the invention so the companies have guarantee that their investment in the innovation pays off".

          The assumption was the invention was something rare and hard, not something you could re-recrate from scratch in a week or evening (in case of software invention) or that patent is only filled to cast a wide net to block the competition

        • 0-_-0 ・ 2 hours ago
          ・ 3 more

          Obscurity makes no sense on a world with patents.

          • close04 ・ an hour ago

            Obscurity is otherwise known as "trade secret". It's used when the company really doesn't want to give anyone even a hint of what and how it's doing things, maybe going as far as assuming nobody can figure out the process independently either, so filing for a patent is out of the question. The Coca Cola formulation is a famous example.

          • teaearlgraycold ・ 2 hours ago

            Unless you don’t think anyone will ever figure out how you do something.

        • jijijijij ・ an hour ago

          > It offers a bargain between society and inventor:for a limited period of exclusivity, the inventor agrees to make the invention public rather than to keep it secret.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent

          In today's world patents are mostly dysfunctional, or straight malignant. They tend to slow, discourage progress and selectively aid large corporation who can afford the legal warfare. They have become also less informative, more vague, so really the bargain with the collective is off now.

      • teaearlgraycold ・ 2 hours ago
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        Uh no you can definitely make a replica of a patented device at home in the US. You can not sell it. I don’t think you could distribute the files of a reverse engineered Noctua fan online either.

        • jijijijij ・ an hour ago
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          Correct me, if I am wrong:

          > Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.

          https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/271

          There seems to be no exception for personal use. A quick search shows apparent patent lawyers claiming personal use/manufacturing not to be permitted, either (I won't link it here, since it may or may not be SEO/AI spam). If I understand correctly, this is also evident by legal precedent regarding rights to repair (invalid defense).

          De facto it may be usually without consequences, since patent violations need to be called out by the offended party. If the patent holder is oblivious, nothing will happen. And since personal reproduction is likely not causing financial damages, you are likely only gonna be told to stop, I presume.

          But it's still infringement and consequently you may get away with reproduction, but cannot talk about it.

          Honestly, I couldn't believe it at first either. It seems wildly overstepping into personal freedom what you are allowed to make with your own hands for yourself. Especially since patents are now granted liberally for stuff borderline trivial, or not actually innovative, lacking thorough research.

          • teaearlgraycold ・ 39 minutes ago

            Hmm, I recall asking my father this but he’s a criminal lawyer not a patent lawyer.

    • unixhero ・ 2 hours ago

      But can I clone my lover?

  • kelnos ・ 5 hours ago

    Unless they have patents on their fan impleller geomeries, the IP they're referring to is likely just trade secrets. Trade secrets do have legal protections in the US, but those protections are mainly about disclosing or stealing those secrets, not about physically inspecting something and deriving the trade secret that way.

    Not sure about the tech aspect of 3D scanning or if that would be accurate enough; I don't have any experience there to draw on.

  • fecal_henge ・ 6 hours ago

    I would think so, or by taking cross sections. Its hard to believe they have some miraculous geometry that needs guarding anyway. Maybe they are trying to dissuade people who might try to 3d print an impeller.

    3d models for industrial fan manufacturers (Sanyo,NMB) are widely available.

    • quanto ・ 6 hours ago

      There could be geometrically tiny optimizations that lead to an outsized impact in noise and flow by turbulence reduction. While optimizing an impeller with computational FSI (fluid structure interaction) is not as hard as before, it still is not trivial. And it's these (perhaps small) optimizations that justify Noctua being 5x more expensive than generic black fan.

      • fyrn_ ・ 6 hours ago
        ・ 4 more

        I believe the tolerances to the fan housing (which reduces turbulence and thus noise), and the the material stiffness needed for that small tolerance, are the alleged reason there are few copycats. Supposedly getting plastic that rigid is hard. I've tried to find hard numbers and validate that claim, but I wasn't able to. Would probably have to measure an actual noctua fan blade to know. On the other hand, metal printing is attainable now..

        • Iulioh ・ 4 hours ago

          While metal printing is attainable..it generally produce shit, surface quality wise. You still need to CNC that if you want a surface roughness not measured in mm

          And is not like a 5axis could not produce these fan geometries from a block

        • HPsquared ・ 4 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          Do they add glass fibers, I wonder. That's a way to make plastic stiffer but it's a bit harder to make.

          • alex43578 ・ an hour ago

            Hopefully not - I’d hate the idea of my fan shedding glass fibers right into the exhaust of my PC and onwards into my office.

  • numpad0 ・ an hour ago

    I think they are trying to stop random small shops from making cosmetic copies that compete with their products.

    Crude copies with convincing appearance would tarnish their brand. Visibly crude copies stop performance data of such copies from being mistaken as representative of actual products.

  • zbrozek ・ 6 hours ago

    Yes, though the fidelity offered by faithful CAD would be both easier to interpret correctly and might even hint at the CAD feature tree.

    Kudos to them for releasing models useful for integration.

    • egeozcan ・ 6 hours ago

      Yes, by no means did I comment to take away from the great service they are doing to the builders. I'm a Noctua fan!

      I was just curious.

      • dcminter ・ 5 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        > I'm a Noctua fan!

        :)

        • egeozcan ・ 2 hours ago

          You may find it hard to believe, but I honestly didn't realize this as I was typing :)

        • layer8 ・ 4 hours ago

          Must be a really quiet guy.

    • ForOldHack ・ 4 hours ago

      From what I remember from my NASA friend, a few companies, hired a few fluid flow engineers, during the defense bust, and designed fan blades that remarkably increased air flow. ( think profiles like air plane wing ). Something happened and in a few years, there were good fans, and there were great fans.

      I happen to own a pair of Noctura fans, and wow! They are great, so I would assume that some heavy lifting was done in fluid flow.

  • nkrisc ・ 2 hours ago

    If your goal is to reproduce it you could just make a cast of the fan and then use that to make a mold.

    It’d be a bit tricky since you wouldn’t really have a convenient spot for a planar parting line, but should be possible.

    • Koffiepoeder ・ 2 hours ago

      Also this would not account for cooling shrinkage, a very annoying problem when making high quality parts to spec.

  • whazor ・ 5 hours ago

    Wouldn't there be too much error when you both 3D scan and 3D print it?

    • PunchyHamster ・ an hour ago

      you'd probably have to do a bit of fixing on a model to get close

    • ForOldHack ・ 4 hours ago

      My guess is that both 3D printed fans and production fans get balanced, but the production fans have an extra bit of design, that makes the profile sail at both a wider speed range, and peaks at a higher speed.

kernalix7 ・ 5 hours ago

Would have saved me time on a 3D printer I designed a while back. I integrated Noctua fans and ended up measuring mounting dimensions by hand. Having the official CAD models would have made fan integration a lot cleaner.

  • userbinator ・ 5 hours ago

    Aren't their dimensions standard? Many people replace other fans with Noctua's, after all.

    • kernalix7 ・ 5 hours ago

      The fan body itself follows standard 120/140mm dimensions, but I needed the smaller details for my design, the rubber dampers, anti-vibration corners, cable routing clips. Those don't show up cleanly in the datasheet, so I ended up using a caliper. That's the part the official CAD would have helped most with.

      • Arch-TK ・ 17 minutes ago

        You're better off for having done the measurements.

        Broadly, it is just good training since you're normally _not_ going to have CAD drawings. If you do this enough, it becomes second nature, and with a 3D printer it's fast to make test prints which you can use to check your measurements against.

        More specifically, it avoids having to wonder if you'd be breaching some law by using those CAD drawings to make a "derivative work". While there's nothing illegal about using precise tools to measure an existing product and create a CAD model. It's (apparently) a silly grey area to take measurements from a CAD representation of a product to make your own CAD model. It can be argued that you're just taking factual information from a reference and using it to produce your own design. But whenever you find yourself saying to yourself that something "can be argued" then you really need to take pause to consider if you want to find that out for yourself or avoid the problem entirely.

        This is the same absurd nonsense that Prusa's "Open" Community License imposes. If I buy a Prusa 3D printer and I just carefully measure it (I don't find this that hard, and I am at best an amateur, consider what an experienced CAD designer could achieve with the right tools), I can create a 3D model of the printer and, as long as I've omitted any separable purely aesthetic elements, I own all rights to that 3D model.

        Moreover, as long as there are no patents on the product, I can manufacture and sell it.

        The hard part of cloning a product like a 3D printer or silent fan is not in getting the exact CAD model, it's in the choice and sourcing of materials, making the right tooling, finding places to make all the parts, etc.

        There are also some secrets on how certain things are manufactured. But those either don't appear in the CAD model or can be easily omitted.

        If manufacturers want to hand out CAD models of their products, they should do so under some highly permissive license, with only enough detail to actually aid in producing mods. The alternative where the license is restrictive, is that you're just giving out poisoned apples that solely restrict the freedoms of anyone who decides to take them.

  • ikornaselur ・ 3 hours ago

    I was just thinking the same! Spent few hours a month ago measuring 120mm noctua fans to build a custom mounting bracket for a rack cooling module I was making.

    Never finished it because I kept having to tweak and remeasure, but now I can definitely go back and finish it!

fy20 ・ 5 hours ago

How much more is the BOM for a silent fan like in Noctua? I recently bought a controller for my well water pump, and it has two 80mm fans for cooling. Sounds like an aircraft when taking off and doesn't seem to move much air. I'm planning to replace them with Noctua fans.

  • throwaway85825 ・ a minute ago

    You're not going to find a significantly quieter 80mm fan. It needs to be bigger so the blade passing frequency is in a less noticeable range.

  • Mashimo ・ 3 hours ago

    Probably best to look up the local prices yourself? We don't know where you live.

    There are fans that are cheaper that come close to noctua, but noctua are one of the best fans you can buy.

  • KeplerBoy ・ 3 hours ago

    Well the cheapest crap fans are almost free, Noctua fans are certainly not free. So the added cost is the entire price of a Noctua fan.

emsign ・ 10 minutes ago

Meanwhile 3D printing is being banned in US states supposedly to prevent people from creating gun parts, because just buying a gun in the US isn't doable for a criminal. But in reality it's because ownership of production and machines is about to get banned for the lower classes.

swiftcoder ・ 4 hours ago

The Fan Showdown YouTube guy is going to have a field day

  • russelg ・ 2 hours ago

    Especially because they previously denied his request for the files (even when they've sponsored him), stating the same IP issue.

jasiek ・ 5 hours ago

Mikrotik does this for some of their parts as well

  • kernalix7 ・ 5 hours ago

    Good to know, didn't realize Mikrotik did this too. Useful for homelab planning where rack space and airflow actually matter.

sylware ・ an hour ago

"Vercel Security Checkpoint"

"enable javascript to continue"

Bugger...