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Cooling keyboard wrist rest

While exploring some other ideas that played around with peltier/thermoelectric effect devices, I had an idea that I think is definitely do-able with my skill level, and could be really cool (heh) and useful. It’s based on this idea: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/169951-wristify-a-personal-peltier-wrist-cooler-that-could-save-the-us-millions-in-energy-costs

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?

Things to buy to get started: