too cold

There is a little warm air coming out of the back of my 500 MHz Rigol scope. I put the board there.

This is a problem! I still keep a gooseneck lamp at my workbench with an incandescent bulb. Might be hard to find a replacement once my stock of bulbs burn out.

The fan exhaust on the laptop I keep at that bench has served me many times for curing epoxy.

You need a high end laptop. My Dell Precision 6800 blows like a hair dryer. Well, maybe not that much air, but it can be pretty warm. Run a spice simulation and lay it behind the PC... it will get warm. I've kept my tea warm that way.

Rick C.

Power supply and a power resistor, stick it on copper clad, cover if you wish. Adjust current to taste.

George H.

I'll write a compute-bound app, with lots of floating point, to keep my laptop exhaust warm.

Actually, LT Spice would work. It can use all the cores, too.

Too bad you can't harness the power of all the hotheads on usenet... ;-)

I have been meaning to make a little oven like that (but with a PID controller), in a thermos (vacuum flask), for drying a few chips before reflow, or curing epoxy, etc.

There were some nice small vacuum flasks at ikea with a very wide mouth. They don't insulate quite as well as others due to the wide mouth but it is good for a tiny oven.

If the power consumption is low then I could leave it on, so that I don't have to wait for warm-up time when curing epoxy.

With more circuitry you can use a transistor as heater... I've got a lamp that runs at 150 C with a TIP121 as heater/pass element. (up to 200C for a few hours.)

Melamine foam makes nice insulation.. again ~200C.

George H.

buy a $30 dehydrator?

There are some cheap micro-refrigerators, consumer products, about big enough for one six-pack. One of those might be handy as a tiny environmental oven, when it's not worth firing up a big one.

No problem. Just place the work in the exhaust air stream from your computah while running a CPU stress test program such as Prime95: When I ran it last, the fan was spinning at maximum speed and sounded like a drone taking off. If you have a SMD hot air desoldering station or a hair dryer style hot air gun, it can probably be used to pre-heat the device and accelerate curing. However, I don't use any of these and prefer to use a coffee warmer or hot plate. I also have a toaster oven that I normally use for BGA or SMD reflow soldering, that I sometimes use for accelerated epoxy curing.

I still have some beautiful Luxo bench/desk lamps, with 100W incandescent and 22W Circline fluorescent around the outside. They're wonderful to work with, and also good for curing epoxy. ;)

Of course I stockpiled a couple of hundred 100W bulbs back in 2012. Enough for a career. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought a couple hundred incandescents (around here somewhere) but then LEDs got so much better that we don't use them.

Get one of these, $10. OK, get two, one for home.

That probably over-estimates the useful power.

John Larkin's habit of posting links to denialist propaganda web-sites probably represents a rather larger expenditure of energy, but it clearly isn't useful.

John Larkin wrote

I still have a 200 W or so photo lamp.

And a 2 kW adjustable electric heater ! (has a fan too). Don't they sell those anymore in US? was about 32 $ here.

Phil Hobbs wrote

Car headlights, I have those too, get very hot, 12V, often use those for testing things.