Peltier Fridge Retrofit Enclosure

thingiverse

Do you have one of these? Do you find its insulation properties to be woefully inadequate? Did you ever wish it were more difficult to open, and looked less like a sleek refrigerator? Do you enjoy unnecessary amounts of work for a small amount of gain? Do you often pose rhetorical questions to yourself in Thingiverse descriptions? Well boy do I have the project for you! I snagged one of these little USB fridges for a project before I realized that it's literally just a straight 200ma of DC to a peltier module and a small fan with a heatsink. It ended up being underpowered for my needs, but I wondered how much cooling you could actually coax from it. Enter, the behemoth. This print is designed to be operable by one hand and provide the maximum amount of insulation in a reasonable print. The two halves of the peliter module are relatively well isolated and the beverage can itself gets 20mm of insulation on every side - not bad at all. It also now accepts full 12oz red bulls! If you're looking for even more cooling, you could easily swap out the peltier module for a more powerful version - eBay and even Amazon have some cheap ones. Search for tec1-1270*, where * is the amperage you want. You may have to upgrade the fan if you do so, I haven't done this myself yet. If you want some more immediate satisfaction and have a 12V 2A power supply laying around, the stock module is a tec1-12702, so you should be able to just solder that bad boy in place of the USB power instead. Print Settings Printer Brand: MakerGear Printer: M2 Rafts: Doesn't Matter Supports: Yes Resolution: .3mm Infill: 12% Notes: You should print this print with as low infill as possible that still ensures dimensional accuracy, as air is a great insulator. These are mass produced somewhere in China, so I can't verify that your fridge will fit; it should, and the design should also be useful for anyone wanting to design their own peltier cooler with a 60mm fan and 70mm heatsink combo. If you have a tendency to overextrude, you might have to sand down the joint between the top half and the two bottom halves, as it has absolutely zero play. How I Designed This I made this design with something I'd call positive-space modeling for lack of a better word. Instead of designing an enclosure around the parts, which often leads to unparametric, throwaway code, I designed a tolerant 3D model of the parts I wanted to enclose and applied the difference between my design and the parts to achieve the desired effect. This ends up being a lot easier to customize and troubleshoot, and I definitely recommend it.