look at my home-made XPS 2 lappie cooler!!! - Page 8

dear god 5 bucks a led. well if your gona use 4 of them, hook them up parallel since you need 3.6v each. 20ma *4 is 80ma. Im getting 1 18ohm resistor for running 4 3.6v/20ma leds in parrallel.

You know if your gona spend $20 on 4 white leds, why not just get a white led flash light and gut the thing for $5-10. They run on 3 1.5v batteries so thats 4.5, then they use a resistor to get it down to 3.6v or so( i think all white leds are 3.6v) so you wont even need to change the resistor, its only a half volt.

Ill put more reaserch into it and see if i can find something cheaper

does anyone know were to get the nuts/spacers and the white rubber feet that tijgert got for his?

I LUV IT!!! If you ever are able to to produce this notebook cooler in black with perhaps the extra fan (as mentioned by shoman24v - under the PC fans) in addition to any other updates; USB Hub for example, I'd buy one immediately!
I'm a fussy little PRIK too, so I'd ask for all my fans to match (from the same fan manufacturer with exact same specs), some better layout of the wiring perhaps and I want to be your first customer!

I'm very serious about buying one from you but I'll need mine labeled and this is a "MUST HAVE" please, #14 as my serial number!

PM me for the price and any other details you need!

Yeah! tijgert you should sell these (if you have extra time on your hands) you could make money!

i would buy one for $40

I see that this thread has been dead for a while, but I found it while in search of a good laptop cooler and decided to follow in his steps, I've ordered the parts and I'm going to build my own laptop cooler so that 1) The laptop fits on the cooler and 2) the fans are actually where my system needs them to be as useful as possible.

I noticed a lot of people asking him to make homemade ones for them and as he didn't have much time, I'd offer my own services (assuming this first one goes to plan). I'll keep anyone interested updated.

I didn't get around to making mine since my house is usually cool anyway

Well I got all the components today, I ended up getting 80x80x15 fans because I couldn't find any 10mm thick fans that had as good a sound ratings and rpm's as I was wanting. I am trying to use plexi-glass instead of poly, which might end up biting me in the rear since it's more brittle, if it breaks I'll just get some poly instead. There's a glass place in town that can supply it easily.

Tijgert, what did you use to drill the holes in your poly? An 80mm hole is pretty big for most of the methods I've looked at so far.

Alright, here we go, I got all the components together and had a chance to get some work done on it. So here's where I am so far.

I've got my plexiglass, two 12 x 14.5 inch 1/8" think sheets. That's I've set up my fan arrangement, and drilled the holes (as well as the corner holes).

And here is the other hardware I purchased, 5 80x80x15mm fans and a whole mess of machine screws and stuff (you can also see the spaces I bought at the top).

Well I'm going to start assembling it now. Gotta do the electrical stuff next (which I'm not quite as familiar with) so I should have some more stuff to show sometime tomorrow.

Well, I got it all assembled yesterday, it went a lot faster than I was expecting.

I got all the fans screwed in, spliced the USB cable to the hot/ground leads on my fans and tightened everything down a bit.





The plexiglass I got is totally clear unlike Tigjert's lexan/poly/perspex, but I know that my supplier here can get me colored poly/plexiglass if anyone is still interested in having someone make them a custom-made laptop cooler.

I'm still doing some tweaking with mine, and have discovered a few of my mistakes (I put two of the fans too close together so that when I tried to put the nuts on the ends of the machine screws the nuts were too close and you couldn't tighten them. But since there are already two screws through that fan it's not going anywhere so I'm not worried.

I'm also planning to put in a option to use 12V power from an old power supply I have lying around. I've got two plans on how to do this. First would be to put a female 3 pin case fan adapter on the ends of the fan leads (which could then be superglued down to the cooler so you have a stationary plug in. Then simply splice a 3 pin male case fan adapter onto the USB cable I already have. Then I've already got the adapter that came with the fans (they originally had the 3 pin case fan adapter on them - so they came with the adapter to plug the 3 pin case fan to the 4 pin ATX style power plug).

My other option would be to basically splice a 4 pin ATX style adapter (like you'd plug into your harddrive) directly onto the USB cable up by the head of the USB. That way you could either plug the USB into your computer or plug the 4-pin ATX into the extra power supply I have. As long as I don't have them plugged in at the same time it shouldn't cause me problems, except for one thing I'm unsure on. Since USB is normally only 5V I'm not sure if the USB cable will be able to handle the 12V power from the power supply...Since I'm decidedly NOT an electrician I'm going to have to ask around to see if they think the USB cable will be ok with the increased voltage.

More to come as I do some fixes (I put the fans in upside down!) and further enhancements (I've been thinking about an on/off switch).

Well, I think I'm finished other than minor changes as I use it.



I ended up using the 3 pin adapters than came with the fans I orderd, it's the same style of adapter used on motherboards to connect to case fans and the processor fan (and they're easy to replace the wires in them).



I put the male end on the cooler and the female end on the two power sources I set up (one a USB cable and the other connects to the neat little variable voltage AC to DC converter I bought at Walmart for $8.


So I can either plug in the USB cable and use 5V directly out of my lappy or I can plug in the variable voltage AC adapter which plugs right into the wall and then I can use the little selector switch to choose between 4.5, 6, 7.5, 9, or 12 volts (it also allows 3 volts, but thats not enough to power the fans). So I've got 5 settings that work pretty well, very low, low, medium, high, and very high(full power to the fans).

I had a lot of fun designing and building this thing. I know people had mentioned before wanting a custom made one like this from Tijgert, so if anyone is still interested I'd definitely be willing to do it. The final cost for mine came to a little under $70, although I could cut that down some pretty easily:

Plexiglass - $10
Fans - $40
Spacers/Screws/Nuts - $7
Rubber Feet - $4
Variable Voltage Adapter - $8

I think you could probably find cheaper rubber feet, but I just picked some up at Walmart that would lift it about 3/4 of an inch off the desk to get high airflow.

The fans are obviously the most expensive part, the fans I found were 80x80x15 (as I couldn't find 10mm ones anywhere) and were $5.99 each plus tax and shipping. If you were willing to just use 80x80x25 standard size case fans I know you can get them for like $2 or less (in packs of 5 or 10)

So as Tijgert said quite a while ago, they aren't cheap (although mine was on the more expensive end since I was trying various things to see if they worked) but of course you're getting a custom made cooler for YOUR laptop with the fans where it needs them!

OK, so I know that this is a mega bump to an old thread, but...

It seems that every cooler on the market does precisely "diddly-squat" to improve cooling, so I would like to rig one up myself as well, but I just have one question: how do you wire up the standard power supply or motherboard plugs on the fans so that they can be powered from a standard universal A/C adapter?

(oh, and very sweet coolers, by the way!)