welcome back guys in this video we are going to be building a glowing desktop drink cooler and so if you ever been sitting there and your drinks been kind of getting hot after a while that you've been sitting on your computer and working on your things and you wish you could maintain an ice-cold glass of whatever water coke whatever you're drinking this is gonna be the thing for you and as I mentioned it's gonna glow so we're gonna have a little bit of a cool LED glowing effect and so right now you're looking at the overall design in SolidWorks and of course you can see the little Popkin that I have modeled in there underneath is the drink cooler and so we are going to zoom out for a second and we're gonna take a closer look at all of the components that make up this project and so you'll see the Popkin has kind of gone out of view and what we're left with are all of the individual components that make up this project and so I'm gonna go ahead and start clicking on some of these things to highlight them so you know what I'm talking about and up at the top we have a 3d printed plate this is just to sort of hide all the components underneath this one here is an aluminum plate so it's very thin though two millimeters thick circular aluminum plate right here this guy is the Peltier plate so this is our solid-state heat pump I'll get into explaining how that works and what that is in a minute this guy here is another 3d printed part that basically holds the Peltier plate in place underneath this fancy looking contraption is a CPU heatsink and fan and so you can just get that at a local electronics store and I'll show you more details about that in a minute as well and down at the bottom this guy here is the housing that holds everything it is also 3d printed and so you have three 3d printed parts each of those I will make option below I'll send you links to all of those probably on Thingiverse or something like that so you can 3d print them yourself if you'd like to complete this project but now we're going to dive into taking a quicker look at how all these components come together to make that awesome glowing LED drink cooler and so before we get started with the build I want to very quickly talk about a Pelletier plate what it is and what it does so a Peltier plate is a thermoelectric cooler and this is just a solid-state heat pump it has two wires coming out of it a positive and a negative wire and when you apply DC voltage you get a hot side and a cold side however without managing that heat flow you'll end up with a burned-up Peltier plate very quickly the hot side will get very very hot and you'll end up with a piece of junk and so to manage that heat flow we're gonna be using a heat sink so this is a CPU heatsink and fan you can see that it's got the Intel science still on it and you can see the Peltier plate that we're going to be using on here for our project and what this is gonna do it's going to draw heat away from the hot side and keep the cold side cool the faster we can draw heat away from the hot side of this plate the colder the cool side gets so the trick is to manage the heat on the hot side and so now that we have that brief explanation out of the way we can take a look at the major parts that we need for this project so in the top left hand corner here you'll see the Peltier plate with the CPU heatsink and fan that I had mentioned earlier it comes in one unit and I found this at my local hobby store over on the right-hand side here you can see several 3d printed parts each of which I will provide the files for in the link in the description so that'll take you to thing verse and you can download these parts and print them yourself on your own printer you'll notice that this part here already has a few small red LEDs pushed into the 3d printed part I'll show you how I did that in the next few steps over here is a 3-inch diameter aluminum plate it's two millimeters thick which I believe works out to be about 14 gauge aluminum and down the bottom here we have a power supply so this is just a DC power supply supplying 12 volts at 5 amps max and so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to take this oddly shaped 3d printed part and make sure we have it oriented in the correct direction so you can see on the back there is a circular recess and this is the direction of which the LEDs will shine and so we've taken the rectangular LEDs push them through the little rectangular holes and we are going to wire the LEDs in series and so we have a positive and a negative lead connected here and soldered at the joint and we're going to keep connecting all the positive and negative leads all the way around until we're left with a positive and negative lead loose on the end and you can just choose one side to put your set of resistors on there and I'll put the equation up here on the screen as to how I figured out the resistance of these for these LEDs but basically I have three resistors just because either these are values that I had on hand to make up their required resistance for 12 volts feeding these five particular LEDs so now that we've inserted the LEDs soldered the leads for each of the LEDs together and we have our cooling plate in place you can see that I've taken the positive wire and run it through the little channel underneath these two leads here the negative one will go over top this leads sort of pushing it down and we're gonna take our glue gun which you can kind of see there in the background and flood the leads we're gonna cover these in the glue just to insulate them because later on we're gonna be putting an aluminum plate over top of this cooling plate and we don't want any of the leads shorting to that aluminum plate so we're gonna insulate them with that glue and so once we have all the leads insulated with the hot glue we want to just take a very quick look at our work from the side and make sure no glue is sitting higher than the cooling plate because as I mentioned where you're going to be putting an aluminum plate on top of here and we don't want any of the glue interfering with that aluminum plate and pushing it up and away from the cooling so we want full contact of the cooling plate if you have any glue that's sitting too high just take a razor blade and cut some of it off so with the cooling plate and the LED is now in place in the holder we can apply a little bit of extra thermal paste to the bottom of this cooling plate now this is optional as your cpu will come with a dab of thermal paste already on it but the surface area here is quite a bit bigger than the dab of paste that usually comes on these little CPU heat sinks and therefore a little bit of extra thermal paste won't hurt to transfer the heat better to our heat sink and one thing you'll also notice is that there is sort of a round boss here on the heatsink and that corresponds with the round recess in this holder so that's what's gonna locate it on the heatsink and the other thing you'll notice is that these LEDs stick out a little bit from the bottom of this three branded part and those LEDs are gonna find their way in between the fins so it's basically gonna fit right in between everything is gonna snap down nice and snug when we locate this part so we can go ahead and flip it over and try and get it so that those LEDs find their way in between those cooling fins and it looks like I got it right and so that plate should have nice contact with our heatsink and we're ready to water the rest of this thing up so why are you this thing is pretty easy as I mentioned earlier the cooling plate only has two wires a positive and negative that required DC 12 volts and when I was looking for my heatsink and fan combination I was looking for a fan that also requires only 12 volts to run it and that way they can be powered from the same source the LEDs we wired and series and they require 12 volts so we added those resistors so that they wouldn't burn up so everything requires 12 volts now if you look at the fan if you're purchasing a different fan or a different CPU heatsink and fan combination some of your fans might come with a four wire connection and some might come with a three wire connection if it's a three wire connection the fan will only run at one speed and you'll apply your 12 volts the positive and negative wires and you should be good to go however if you have a four wire fan like I do here you can peel back the sticker and might be a little hard to see in there but usually on the PCB it'll reveal which wires do what so of course you're gonna need a positive and negative wire and in my case my positive wire is yellow my negative wire is black and if I look a little bit closer there are two other labels in there one for the green wire and one for the blue wire my green wire has an S and my blue wire has a C and those stand for control and sense now we're more interested in the control wire so the blue wire here so if I just apply 12 volts to this fan it will turn on and it will start to spin but it will set itself to a slower default speed now if we want the full cooling capacity of this fan then we're gonna have to kick things up a notch when this is used inside of a computer a four wire fan has the control wire send a PWM signal so it goes up to about five volts in our case we only want to run this fan at the full speed so we need to send it a five volt signal and to do that we're gonna be using this lm7805 voltage regulator so that'll take our 12 volt signal and bump it down to 5 volts for that blue wire everything else will still get 12 volts but our blue wire will get 5 volts and to support this voltage regulator all you need are two other components here which are just too small capacitors and I'll show you guys how to wire everything up and so wiring this thing up should be a breeze we have two wires like I mentioned earlier red for positive black for negative coming from our cooling plate and I've crimped quick-disconnect fittings on to the ends of each of these wires for our power supply I've done the same thing there's a red for positive and a block for negative so that was easy enough and now that we know that our red is going to be positive we can look at our five volt regulator our lm7805 and we can take a quick look at our datasheet and we can see that it needs two capacitors you can see that I have a very small capacitor running from the input to the middle pin which is our ground and have a slightly larger capacitor running from again the middle one our ground to the outer pin on the right-hand side which is our output and so we have input ground and output and so we have 12 volts coming into our red wire here and I've spliced off an orange wire to go to the input you can see on the left-hand side on the negative wire here I've spliced off another wire this blue wire the dark blue wire and that goes to the middle pin which is our ground and coming off of our output wire so the one on the right hand side or rather our output pin I have a lighter blue wire now this is the lighter blue wire that I mentioned for that is used for the fan so it's supposed to get that 5 volt pwm signal and since we're sending in a solid 5 volts it should kick the fan on to its highest setting you can see that the green wire here which was unused has just been cut off and I'll tape that off and put it aside coming off of our LEDs it's the same thing we have a positive and negative and if you follow those around where I routed the wires they end up getting spliced into the red positive 12 volt and the black negative and so that's it it's pretty straightforward before we start buttoning things up with all the 3d printed pieces I'm going to use a few tie straps and get these things out of the way off to the side make sure nothing is shorting out and we're ready to do the final assembly and so lastly our final assembly should be pretty straightforward we're going to very carefully place our assembly so far into this outer 3d printed ring and you can see that there are bosses and those bosses indicate the top side of this ring the bottom side they are completely flat so the first thing that we got to do is we have to just very carefully guide our connectors through the holes in this ring so I'm going to just take a second to do that here and so once we push those through we can now just slip this assembly onto those bosses and just make sure none of the wires are pinched once all the wires out of the way it should sit nice and flat on top of those bosses and we're ready to move on to the second part of the assembly and so in preparation for our final step i've smeared a little bit of cpu thermal paste onto the Peltier plate and that's going to aid in heat transfer from this aluminum plate into the Peltier plate now it's just a very thin layer you don't need a whole lot and we're gonna place our plate on top Center it the best we can you can kind of move it around a little bit and spread the paste on evenly and the last thing we're gonna do is we're gonna place our top 3d printed disc on top and we're gonna use our m3 screws to mount into the holes on this outer ring this 3d printed outer ring now on the street printed out a ring you can run an m3 tap through those holes just to clean them up but they're sized properly so that the bolt should actually just cut the wrong threads into the softer plastic when you go to screw them in and so if I place this on top and actually I see on the bottom there's a nice locating ring for our aluminum plate it should just slide over and we can find our holes insert our screws and start threading them into place the bolts tightened down we're ready to fire this thing up and test it out and so finally we've connected our power supply to our drink cooler and we're ready to test this thing out and make sure everything works so firing up the power supply the fan definitely just turns on you can hear kick on now the LEDs are on we are going to turn off a few lights in here see if we can get that nice glow effect through our 3d printed case and there you go you can see it glowing and we're gonna do a little bit of a test here that plate is definitely getting cooler and it's gonna take just a little while longer to get up to or get down rather to its coolest temperature and so after about thirty seconds this thing seems to have reached its minimum temperature and it is quite cold I would compare it almost to holding an ice cube just maybe not quite as cool as an ice cube so it's probably somewhere above the freezing point but it is time to put our drink on get back to work and enjoy and so that wraps up our drink cooler build and I just want to briefly talk about the few things that I would change if I do this project again and so the first thing I would change is definitely this outer casing I left a lot of room for airflow through the casing however if you guys noticed in the video that the bottom fan sits almost on the tabletop when this thing is placed on the table and so there really isn't an efficient way for the air to flow through the bottom of the fan and then through the heatsink and so in the design files that I provided you guys in the description down below this outer casing is a little bit taller to more easily allow air to flow in through the bottom and then through the heatsink so that should improve the efficiency of this thing just a little bit and the second thing that I would definitely change is in this video I used a 12 volt constant power supply now these Peltier plates work a little bit better if you're using a constant current power supply rather than constant voltage and so by supplying this thing the 12 volts constant it sort of leveled out around three and a half amps so it's drawing about three and half amps where I think you could easily push about five amps through this thing to really maximize the cooling of this plate and so at three-and-a-half amps it was pretty cold like I said it was almost as cold as touching an ice cube but I think we could definitely do better by using a constant current power supply so if you guys are building this thing you might want to look into a constant current power supply but just keep in mind you might have to change some of the wiring or the LEDs because you won't want to push five amps through those LEDs you'll definitely burn them out and so that's it guys thanks for watching I hope you guys decide to build your own desktop drink cooler and if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comment section down below