3D-Printed Headache Cooling Mask

YouTuber Sparks and Code’s wife suffers from headaches, and while she finds some relief from a cold gel mask, they only stay cold for around 10 minutes. Although a less industrious person would simply accept this as the norm, or maybe even buy another mask or two to swap out in the freezer, Sparks decided to create a 3D-printed water cooling mask that can stay at the right temperature for much longer.

To start off with, rather than guessing at his wife's proper facial dimensions, Sparks fed a number of photos into a photogammetry routine running on Google Colab to generate a facial 3D model. After a bit of cleanup work, he was able to use this model in Fusion 360 to generate the mask portion, making the assumption that standard plastic filament wouldn’t be sufficient to transfer heat. He also chose to use an advanced cooling system that implements an ESP8266 board and relay for control, and did quite a bit of work to perfect his code and the electronics setup. However…

After spending much time, and many ruined prints trying to perfect the process for a metallic face strip, Sparks eventually elected to try it with printed plastic only, and found this worked perfectly. In fact, a simple pump setup pushing water through the mask’s cavity provides just the right amount of cooling for his wife’s face.

So at the end of the day, the simpler printing process worked pretty well, and only a manual switch was needed to keep the cooling at the right level. He’s quick to admit that the process was over-engineered, and that he could have saved a lot of time if he had constructed a quick prototype.

Perhaps the larger lesson is, don’t afraid to step back and challenge your assumptions early on in a build process to save time. On the other hand, following an unnecessary rabbit hole once in a while can be a good learning experience, and you never know if it might help out in the future! Code and print files are available on GitHub for your perusal.