Basically a little desk/bookshelf/whatever lamp that has a cylindrical base with lights that point up and a fan, then a slim metal rod sticks up with a little wide flat spot on top of that. Above that would be a very light “parachute” that is modeled after some sort of cool parachute that has a lot of light colors, that is tied down to the cylinder and the rod sticks up inside of it.
When the lamp is turned on the fan and lights kick on, the fan inflates the parachute and the lights shine into the parachute, with the light colored parts acting as a diffuser/lamp shade to spread the directed light around the area as a whole.
Might make sense to tie the parachute to the rod in some way to avoid it spinning and tangling itself up. Probably will take a good amount of fiddling to get the parachute to inflate every time, but could be fun.
Since COVID started, the wife and I have been working from home, and as such we don’t have the nice air conditioned offices that we would at our normal work locations. This has lead to the interesting decision on warmer days… turn on the home A/C and use more electricity (and up our bill), hope a fan and open window can cool us enough, or accept that we’re going to be sweaty and uncomfortable. What if there was another option that worked when it wasn’t quite warm enough to justify the expense and decadence of the A/C, but worked better than a fan and open window to the warm outside? Enter: my idea (based on “wristify” linked above).
What if I could make a little device that went in front of your keyboard that was cooled by a peltier device and used the principle from wristify to make your whole body feel cooler? This would have a slim triangular shape to act as a wrist rest for your keyboard and some sort of thermally-conductive metal surface that would have peltier devices behind it and little fans to help with the heat rejection on the other side.
Basic sketch:
(it helps that the wife and I have the same dell-model keyboard provided by work so a single design will work for both of us)
Some details:
Ideally it could all be powered by a standard USB (probably 2.0+) plug
Copper would probably be good for the cooling surface on top
On-off switch on the side
(possibly) a pot to adjust the on/off duty cycle to make more/less cold within “safe” range of duty cycles
(maybe/hopefully) some sort of auto-shutoff if inside gets too warm
would want LED or some indicator that it’s inhibiting cooling
Things still need to work out:
Duty cycle of the peltier effect devices to not get too cold/hot
Make sure the fans can reject the heat without creating a heat-gun on the side or melting/damaging the surface below the keyboard
It looks like they don’t make fans small enough to be side-to-side. Might need to design channel in the bottom and have horizontal fan with inlets in side and outlets on bottom through channels
Easiest/cheapest/dumbest way to achieve tunable duty cycle and (maybe) pot-adjustment
Can you just buy small copper plates at like Home Depot/Lowes?
