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First Steps

A project log for Keyboard Heater

Keep your hands warm in the winter.

compukidmikecompukidmike 11/10/2020 at 00:120 Comments

My initial thought was to use the heating elements from a small radiant space heater. I ordered one from Amazon and after taking it apart, decided it wouldn't work quite like I wanted. I got looking closer at the pictures of the commercial version, and I noticed something that looked familiar.

The heating element was a small coil inside a glass tube, and I realized that it's a halogen lamp! With that information, I went to walmart and grabbed a couple $10 halogen work lights. Normally they run on 120V and draw 500W. I suspected that the commercial product was simply running them at a lower voltage. After some testing, I determined that it was probably 24V since that resulted in a 1.66A current draw and 40W for each lamp, which matches the stated 80W current draw of the commercial version (2 lamps).

At this point I decided to try it out for a few days to make sure it was going to work like I thought. I pulled out the lamp holder and reflector and mounted it in a small vise in front of my keyboard. It worked really well, but needed to be more focused and pointed down slightly.

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