Thermoelectric coolers are so cheap these days

I remember when buying a thermoelectric cooler, I'd have to spend $25 for one. I just ordered 5 on ebay for $12. It's great to see prices go down for components. Anyways, I plan to use one or two with some heatsinks to make an active phone cooling stand. I just need to find a way to get good contact with the phone.

Here's a heated small heatsink I had and placed on the cooler, then it gets switched on.

Phone Cooling

I was messing around with using a cell phone as a security camera. The phone has wifi, a battery, can be easily plugged in to keep charge. and there are apps out there that can turn them in to these easy webcams. So I decided to play with it.

While it all works good and well, something I noticed was the phone got hot. Like, really hot. I decided to shut off the app before things got out of hand but I did snap some thermal pictures before that. The app streams 1080p video at the highest frame rate it can, so it taxes both the wifi module and the processor.

At first i found it interesting that all the heat was concentrated in such a small area. But then I realized that's normal since the battery takes up most of the internal body. You can feintly see the battery outline as it started to heat up as well.

So, this has made me decide I think i want to make some sort of cooler stand for phones. Like a heatsinked phone stand. This leads to a few options, some overkill, that I may explore.

• Just use a fan blowing on it - This has it's pros for a few reasons. It's low power, doesn't need flush contact with the device, no maintenance or real worry about it failing. Downside is air cooling won't be the most effective option.
• Heatsink plus Fan - This is almost as simple as just a fan. Heatsinks are cheap (I have many lying around) and they work well. Good enough for a cpu in the desktop is probably good enough for your phone. Downside to this, and the rest of the options is that they need a flush and direct contact with the device.
• Water cooling - This adds a lot of uneeded complexity to the situation. You need tubing, a pump, a radiator, and still a fan to get this working. The benefit over just a heatsink may be mnimal as well. So as I write this, it's already out the window.

I may think of other options but this is now an official project for me to think about. Though I still have other projects I haven't finished. Need to get some stuff done eventually.