Lately I've found it nice to when sitting in a chair have a fan on the floor in front of my feet, blowing at my shins and knees. My knees have been a bit sore lately and the cool air helps. Plus, if the weather is hot, that's a convenient place for the fan to blow air across most of my body. Anyway, sometimes I need to adjust the aim of the fan, to blow at one knee or the other, or both evenly, or down at my shins, or up at the underside of the table for reduced knee cooling. It's easy enough to do with my feet, because the fan is the vortex air circulator type on a tilting mount [link] with feet that can slide on the floor, but it can be imprecise—I have to make an adjustment, feel where it's blowing, and adjust again if necessary. If I had a more finely controllable way of adjusting the fan's aim, that would be convenient.

Therefore, my envisioned fan would be on an altitude– azimuth mount, controlled by either servo motors with a remote control or Bowden cables (like bike brake/derailleur cables) with handles. The Bowden cable option would be cheaper, but limited in remoteness. The servo motor option would be more expensive, but you could mount the fan farther away (such as on the ceiling, even) and still control it. It could even be programmable to move in various patterns on its own, whereas existing fans with the oscillating feature are only capable of moving in one axis and at a fixed frequency.

This could also be useful on buses. You know how buses have those little fans at the front that the driver can aim by hand? Well, this could make it easier to do that without getting up from the driver's seat. In that case, because the spatial relationship between the fan and the controls is fixed, a rigid linkage of some kind could be used.

n/a [2019-03-11]
-- notexactly, Mar 11 2019

The fan I'm currently using (Vornado 5303) https://b3h2.scene7...90$&wid=690&hei=690
Mentioned in idea description [notexactly, Mar 11 2019]

Roomba_20Radiator get it to follow you around and voila [xenzag, Mar 11 2019]

Fan-aiming flashlight A postvious idea of mine. These could be substitutes for each other to some extent, but I think this one is more suited for personal cooling, while the other is more suited for set-and-forget ventilation. [notexactly, Aug 26 2019]

I can see no reason why this does not already exist. [+]
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Mar 11 2019



random, halfbakery