Thread: DIY: Built a heater for my LCD

yeah resistors get hot i ahve burn my fingers on them many time chargeing capcitor with them. just cant remeber to size they they were. but certain one get really ******* hot.

Look for high-temp epoxy or "thermal glue". I've done some recent work on heaters and you quickly realize most tapes and househole adhesives dont hold up after a couple temperature cycles.

Thermal glue is an alternative to silicone chip paste. Instead of just being a runny paste its sets hard. Used in putting heatsinks on regulators in power supplies or sometimes for power transistors.

hey man, don't know if you thought of this, but do you know what happens to a can of soda when you take it out of the fridge & leave it on the table in the summertime? condensation....

anytime you rapidly warm a cold object it will cause condensation to form, now I'm not saying what your doing won't work, but this is definatley something to at least be aware of & look for in your testing... if anything you may want to slow down the heat-up time to lessen the buildup of condensation, hate to see you fry it...

Yea I dont know about the condensation issue yet. I got this idea when I saw the rugged LCD's that autonode sells:
http://autonode.com/displays.html
Some of them have a heater option. Does anyone know how those are designed?

I know this is an old thread...but Id like to bump it for more opinions on the condensation issue since winter is coming and I really want to get this working. I still havent found an issue to my problem...and I would hate to go the winter without the carpc.

I always thought that condensation was formed on a warm surface that is being cooled and not a cold surface being warmed (I think my prof said that in chem class last semester). That was also the impression that I was getting when I wiki'ed "condensation." Can someone verify or correct me if I am wrong? I am guessing this must be wrong because I was eating toast today and the hot toast created water droplets on my glass table when I let the slice of toast rest on the table. In fact, the area on the table near the toast was almost soaked in condensation...someone that I do not want to recreate inside my k301.

I wouldn't worry about it, the lcd will be a bit sluggish till it warms up, but it works fine.. when it get's too cold is when your hardrive won't even spin up, even then, let it warm up a bit as the interior warms up, then it'll boot. there are extreme weather hardrives, but expensive & small, ok for mission critical apps, but a little warm up time is all that's needed really. the screen is no problem really.

No, I realize the screen itself will be fine. Its just that the screen has a sensor that electronically prevents the screen from turning on until the temperature is higher than -10C. That is why I need to physically warm up the screen as I have no idea where the temp sensor is to maybe somehow hack it (the ideal solution).

instead of a bunch of resistors, you could also use the resistive coil that's in those coffee cup warmers (you know, the ones made just for 1 cup of coffee that sell for just a couple $ ). The resistive coil inside most of those is thermally/electrically shielded with a fiberglass 'sleeve' so that it doesn't short out or melt the immediate surroundings (which in the case of the warmers is cheap plastic).

My guess is that the coil will heat up faster than a series of resistors as the coil was designed to do so. Even though most of those warmers are designed with AC in mind, feeding DC through the coil will still produce the heat (I had a small coil that got pretty hot running off a 9v battery).

http://www.goldmine-elec-products.co....asp?dept=1196