El-cheapo (very) basic active laptop cooler pad

Step 5 Final touches

now remove the protective plastic foil off the acrylic. you can add some felt to assure some spacing between the hot laptop and the plastic. this will allow some of the air blown by the fan to cool the rest of the laptop's bottom.

the book you see in the picture is the final touch. it's giving you the inclined surface you need to type comfortably and allows the fan to pull/blow air. i know you can add another piece of acrylic instead of the book but this is really meant to be cheap and fast :)

Comments

[schicanoloco]

Great Idea - Ive been wanting to build a cooler , since the cheapo ( $15 target) i purchased croaked! It was a plastic POS that sucked air instead of blew onto not good! I used to sell some awesome aluminium coolers but they are upwards of 100$ .. This simple quickie method, im sure outperforms the plastic "air sucker". I am concerned , however of the electronics .. using the wrong fan will result in overloading your laptops USB hardware and might cause PSU failure because of voltage spikes... be careful not to draw too much current from your usb port! use ohms law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm%27s_law) to figure how much current your fan will draw.. any ??s email me at [e-mail]

[DIYSlacker]

don't worry about the current draw. most fans have low current draw in the first place so it's quite safe to use USB. they even make USB fridges nowadays that use a fan and a special heat exchanger, all from one USB port. this one uses even less power.

[drats666]

Another thing you can use instead of the felt(which don't give much clearance) is those small rubber feet stabalizers from radio shack. one side (top) is flat and has sticky thing on it to stick it to something(like the top and bottom of the cooling pad). Also I'd recommend adding a second piece of acrylic below the fan(or above depending on how you planed on using this). of course you'd then have to stablize the corners which can be done with a bolt and nut(dont tighten to much as it will crack the acrylic). if you want the entire thing to be slanted (like the book effect) you can use the second acrylic and bolt method and just use nuts on each bolt. You raise the back and put a nut on it, then put a second bolt below the bottom piece of acrylic. basically same for the front but you lower that end. If you want you can use a dreble to carve out small flat notchs for the bot and nut to rest on (gives it a little more stability and professional look)

[Durrandi]

I wrote my senior theses on that book...