Gadgetory

what's going on guys we're doing something a little bit different today as you all know it is now summertime ambient temperatures are rising and you might be thinking to yourself how do I stay cooler how do I actually stay cool and beat the heat this summer not just your system but you yourself admin temps are very important also so what we're gonna be doing today is trying to find a way to keep you guys cool by DIY in our very own USB fan not just any fan though we're gonna be using a standard 12 volt PC case fan like this one to conduct all of this madness it should be a lot of fun and I have a lot of spare fans to burn in case this doesn't go well so I can't really think of any other reasons why we're doing this the inner Mac saber a full Tower chassis features premium RGB sync lighting included RGB strips and three pre-installed twister bearing RGB fans enjoy a tempered glass window power supply shroud and extensive water cooling support with two included front panel options for prioritizing silence or airflow compromise nothing with the enter max a beret you can learn more by clicking the link below I should also mention that the items I picked to complete this project were not picked with a budget in mind so this is definitely gonna be more expensive than your typical USB fan that you can buy on Amazon but you can always tweak the items that I picked here to kind of align with your budget if you really want to shave things down and you can find links to all this stuff in the description let's quickly go over all the parts that we're using starting with the fan of course this is just a typical 200 millimeter RGB fan yes it has RGB this is actually pulled from the H 500 P mesh so that case is now missing a fan you can see here we've got our three pin fan connector as well as our four pin RGB connector I was thinking that we would just plug this all in once it's all said and done into a laptop so I don't I don't think we're gonna be able to utilize the RGB element of this fan which is quite sad but who knows so this is a 200 millimeter fan but you can really go with any size fan you want doesn't matter if it's 80 millimetres 120 140 it's your personal preference and all I'd say most PC case fans are of the 12 volt variety however USB as most you guys know is rocking 5 volts so what would happen if you actually stripped this wire and your fan wire and and merged them together you started them together the fan would still technically spin up but it would spin at a much lower rpm than what it's rated for simply because it's not getting enough juice which would equate to a lackluster fan experience you wouldn't get quite the airflow you're looking for and it wouldn't be very worthwhile in the end so we have a way around this though I actually picked up a set of four of these step-up boosters on Amazon for about 10 bucks for all four so it's fairly cheap what this essentially does is it converts say a five volt input it even has micro USB input so we don't even have to solder the wire here for the micro USB it converts a five volt input to pretty much any volt output up to I think 28 volts for this particular unit here there's an adjustable knob for voltage and we can essentially keep turning that knob and testing the output voltage with a multimeter for example until it reads 12 volts that way we know that the USB is now giving us 12 volts of power and that our fan will will actually spin at its proper rpm at full speed now with that said we'll obviously need a soldering iron like this one pretty simple I think I got this on Amazon for around 20 bucks or so we're gonna have to solder of course the fan cable to the step-up converter so this will help us do that with a tube of some basic solder and I have a wet sponge on hand so I can sort of deoxidize the tip of the soldering iron and also keep it clean while it's in use final items you'll need include electrical tape so that you can mask off any of the handy work that you've done once you're finished with the step-up converter and then a wire cutter and stripper not that kind of stripper this is just a wire cutter I don't have a stripper on hand so we're just gonna be using this for both and last but certainly not least we'll need something to mount our fan to because obviously you could just stand the fan up on your desk or whatever but it's not the most stable and just it's here we have a tablet stand this actually fits I believe 7 to 13 inch tablets and I already do the measurements and our 200 millimeter fan will fit no problem you want to make sure that whatever tablets stand you're buying can fit obviously whatever size fan you're opting for and you can really choose any style of tablet stand as well this one just kind of sits on your desk and articulates a little a few ways but there's also the tablet stands that can clamp to the edge of your desk that have like a three foot long bendy arm so really the choice is up to you it's a personal preference thing we're gonna go with something a little bit more simple today so those are all the things those I think there's like about 10 items here that we're using to finish the job and again you can find links to all this stuff in the video description but I think on that note we're pretty much ready to go so I guess I'll start with step one what is what is step one I've never done this before alright so the first step I want to take here is to calibrate our little step-up converter you can see I've actually already plugged it in with the USB and the u.s. the other end is plugged into a laptop here so we're getting constant power and then I have the multimeter hooked up to the endpoints the the output points right here and then you can see we have a voltage readout of 17 around 17 volts at the moment I'm gonna go ahead and turn this knob as I turn it looks like we're going down in voltage which is the correct direction we're looking for and there we are at around 12 volts perfecto so now that that's out of the way we can move on to destroying our fan we're actually gonna snip off the 3-pin connector goodbye ow and we're gonna have to figure out which of these wires is positive and which one is our ground because the other one the third one is just a sensor for the fan itself which we won't be needing so I'm gonna go ahead and strip the wires down that way we can expose the metal strands underneath let's do a little test boot here if you will I'm gonna bring the laptop back briefly plug in the USB cable which is still connected to our step-up so all's I got to do now is pick any two random wires and sort of make them touch our soldering out points and hey look at that we have a connection so first try nailed it we've just identified our positive and ground wires so we can move on to soldering all right soldering iron is on and it's pretty much all heated up I actually have it at 350 degrees Celsius so it is hot and I'm gonna go ahead and just brush it on this wet sponge briefly just to remove any oxidization and this is actually my first time soldering folks so everyone say a prayer and probably look up like an actual YouTube tutorial on how to solder and don't do what I'm about to do well it's not the finest soldering job but hopefully it's enough now we can let the solder dry for about 30 seconds or so all right so now we can test my soldering job by simply plugging our USB cable into a power source ahahaha god works it works Oh feeling cooler already it's got a nice it's got a nice kind of breeze to it and it's fairly quiet - good job Coolermaster definitely feels like it's operating at the full 800 rpm yeah yeah oh yeah at this point I say we take care of this ugly step up I mean it's functional we know that now but it's also kind of an eyesore so let's tape it up with some electrical tape and then finally mount the fan onto the tablet holder and then we'll be done tablets span it sounds stupid why they call it a tablet holder what am i grandpa electrical tape what I like about this is that at least with the fan that I chose and the stand I guess maybe they kind of pair nicely together it actually kind of just looks like a regular desk fan I mean you'd really have to kind of give it a second glance too to tell that it was sort of a DIY project I'm not trying to toot my own horn or anything but I don't know it looks but it looks pretty good I wouldn't be super embarrassed to have this on my desk yeah I made that no big deal I guess this is all to say that if you guys are into tinkering with your Hardware careful how you interpret that and you like DIY projects then maybe this is one to try out I don't know and if you guys have already done something like this or this exact project let us know how it went in the comments below if you have any tips to share with the class as far as the RGB thing goes I have not hooked it up I don't really have a proper way to hook up RGB via USB at the moment it'd be nice if I could just pop it into the laptop along with the fan but I do have a power supply that's off-screen at the moment so I'll just plug this in just to give you guys a little hint huh that's what it would look like if there was some some LED action unfortunately I don't have the controller set up or anything so we're stuck with green so one out of three ain't bad you know we're missing that the R and the B but at least we got the G thank you so much for watching this video toss a like on it if you enjoy this kind of wacky stuff that we do occasionally and maybe we'll do more of it in the future go ahead and subscribe to the channel for more tech stuff coming at you really soon and feel free to check us out on floatplane for 3 bucks a month if you want to watch our videos a whole week early without ads I'll put a link for that in the video description till next time guys thank you for watching this one have a good one and I'll see y'all in the next video