These are the perfect shoes for sitting inside during a snow day! Via derwassi on Instructables.
In this instructable I’ll show you how I solved the problem of my girlfriend having cold feet all the time.
Because warm shoes fit perfectly to the coldest time of the year, those shoes will be her christmas present:-)
I’ve seen quiet a few solutions to warm up your feet by the use of a heating element. But all of them are either rather expensive (e.g. heated soles, which contain a li-po battery warming your feet for a few hours), bulky (external battery pack which has to be attached to the leg somewhere), not very economically (pretty much every solution using batteries) or just unhandy (powering via USB-cable => I think pretty much everyone can see the attached laptop crashing on the floor…).
I decided for a nearly cableless solution. I added a heating element which is powered via inductive coils. So while you’re sitting in your favorite spot you can put your feet on some kind of platform and your feet get warm, you can still move around freely and don’t have to change or reload any batteries.
on the down side: Your feet are not warmed up while walking around.
But on the other hand: when you’re walking around and working inside you usually don’t freeze…Skills:
- Very basic soldering skills (attaching cables…)
- knitting and hand sewing (if you want to make the shoes really warm;-))
- You should be able to cut with a knife, without losing a finger;-)
Materials:
- two pairs of inductive chargers (I used those: http://www.adafruit.com/products/1407)
- heating elements (I scavanged mine from two heated scarfs)
- approx. 12V/10W power source.
- approx. 2m of two-wire cable
- A pair of house-shoes (you need some with a hard sole, so that you can integrate the inductive coils)
- felt wool for knitting + 5 size 12 knitting needles
- Yarn (to attach the felted house shoes to the hard soles)
- plywood (~4 times the size of your foot)
- glue
- epoxy glue
- wood glue
- some thick paper
- some laquer
- exacto knive
- Soldering iron
- scroll saw or hand saw
- needle nose pliers
- small drills
See the full tutorial here.
Featured Adafruit Product!
Inductive Charging Set – 5V @ 500mA max: Inductive charging is a way of powering a device without a direct wire connection. Most people have seen inductive charging in a rechargable electric toothbrush: you may have noticed that you recharge it by placing it into the holder, but there’s no direct plug. These chargers work by taking a power transformer and splitting it in half, an AC waveform is generated into one, and couples into the second coil. Read more.
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