neptronix said:
What i could really use is a heated keyboard. I'm a >=100wpm typist normally and type for a living but in the cold, i'm down to half or less that speed. Putting any kind of layer between the fingers and the keyboard would be a non-starter.
A tale of hair, air, and warm:
Long ago in a poorly heated house with no insulation (so general heating was an expensive fail) I took my keyboard apart to clean the dog hair out of it, and found that the top half didn't fully close down on the area around the keys (allowing dog hair to migrate inside the entire body, not just under the keys), and I realized that this also meant that air could flow from the body of the keyboard to under/between the keys, if it was forced under there, and possibly keep the dog hair from falling into it in the amounts it usually did (at the time I had Lady, a wolf-pyrenees-samoyed mix).
So I took a slot-mounted large (palm-of-a-large-hand-sized) squirrel cage fan (intended to cool 1990s video cards) and cut the end of the keyboard open, and secured the fan's output "box" to that, and ran the fan first from just 5v, so it would be quiet. This wasnt' enough air, so I tried 12v (what it was meant to run on) and it didn't really do what I wanted...but I realized that since it blew air thru and out under my fingers, I *could* put a heater on the air intake and warm up my fingers without having to bury them in the dog's fur every few minutes to unfreeze them.
So I did that, first with a handy coffee-tea-mug warmer element right over the fan intake, which was insufficient, and then with a small heating pad's elements in a cylinder leading into the intake on the side (now top) of the fan. This worked fine, though I usually had to have the pad on high. I was also able to change the fan to 7v (wired between the 5v and 12v positive lines, and no ground connection) and it ran fast enough to warm my fingers without making nearly as much noise as at 12v.
Worked great for as long as I needed it in winters at that house.
KEyboards are made differently inside, so yours might not allow the same airflow path, and this technique might not work for yours.
But you could still make a little "hood" that sits "behind" the keyboard and above it a bit, that takes the heated air and pushes it over the top of the keyboard. (this is what I would have done if the other trick hadn't worked ).
This solution is probably too noisy if you need silence, but you could put the fan itself somewhere else, and duct the air from it to the end (or better, the back/top) of the keyboard, with the heating element(s) inside the duct.