Projects update 2017-06-21

The web version of [NSFW] Hexy Bondage is coming along. However, this week, I've mostly been working on building outrageous things out of cardboard:

[Photo: Me wearing a top hat made out of cardboard, with a power cord dangling past my face.]

To help with my allergy problems, I made this top hat that is also an air purifier. It has a fan and filters inside it, and it blows a continuous stream of filtered air down my face. It's working great.

The hat weighs 1 pound, it's pretty comfortable to wear, and the fan is quiet. It's much more efficient than a normal air purifier because a normal one tries to purify the whole room, while this one just purifies my face. Since it doesn't use much power, it can theoretically run off a rechargeable battery for over 24 hours.

I definitely plan to write a full blog post describing this hat and how I built it, but I'm not ready to do that quite yet. I want to wait until it's all the way finished, and specifically, I want to wait until I've actually tried running it off a battery. And although I've ordered a battery, I have to wait a few weeks for it to be shipped.

I've also been working on the next version of my carrying contraption – this time made out of cardboard! The new design will hopefully solve the problems of the previous version, while being cheaper and easier to build as well. However, I'm only in the early stages of prototyping so far.

– Eli

Approximate readability: 7.84 (1028 characters, 243 words, 13 sentences, 4.23 characters per word, 18.69 words per sentence)

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Comments

Kagar · June 22, 2017 · Permalink · Reply

Does the brim serve a purpose, or is it just to make it a top hat? Do you have issues balancing it? Do you get better results from having the fan pull the air through the filter, or push it through?

Eli Dupree · June 22, 2017 · Permalink · Reply

There's a bit of foam padding inside the brim, which grips my head pretty securely. That lets me move my head around without the hat getting unbalanced, even though its center of mass is pretty high.

The fan pulls air from above my head and pushes it into the space inside the hat. From there, there is a small air passage open at the front, pointing down towards my face. The brim piece keeps that passage open, as well as helping with the grip on my head. The shape of the brim/padding matches my head closely enough to prevent air from getting out any other way.

The fan is sandwiched between a washable prefilter and a HEPA filter. I haven't tried any other ordering of them, because this ordering also helps keep things from getting caught in the fan (my hair, for instance). And theoretically, there's not much difference between pulling and pushing. If everything is sealed well enough, it's just the same static pressure drop either way. There might be a difference in turbulence, but it's probably small.