Cell Phone Dock Charging Station From Scrap Materials

Hello, fellas!

Here I come with another instructable... I wanted to make a cell phone charging station that could hold all my cell phone chargers and my cell phones that was modular, and I could take out the cell phone chargers whenever I wanted.

This is because I travel a lot and I always have to take my chargers with me, so this feature was important to me.

Step 1: Find Stock & Design

This is the raw material I used for this project. It's an old wardrobe door that I found in my neighborhood. Recycling!

I could do a rough design and start cutting material, but I preferred to do the complete design to prevent future inconsistencies and to get the right measurements for fabrication.

I used a five plugs extension cord, and also I wanted it to have a switch, so I could turn them all off and save energy.

Dimensions in the last picture are in milimeters.

Step 2: Cut the Wood

Here I used a table saw to cut the door. I used roughly 80% of this door, leaving me with little scrap material that I could reuse in small projects or temporary tools.

I used a file to smooth the rough corners, and sanded the panels to do a future painting job.

Step 3: Assemble the Box

Before assembling the box, I needed to drill the connector holes and also a small notch to pass the extension cord to the outside.

Since I decided to assemble this box entirely with screws, I drilled the masks on the back and side panels, and bored the holes to fit the bolt heads.

After that, it was simple to assemble the box.

Step 4: Testing the Extension Cord / Mount the Door

Before going to the finishing steps, I had to test if the extension cord would fit well like in the design. I preassembled it, and mounted the door afterwards.

Step 5: Assemble the Door Lock

I used a door stop to lock the door, the kind that usually is used to maintain the door open. It worked very well, because it pulls the door and compensates the assembly imperfections.

Step 6: Fabricate the Small Metallic Parts

Here i used aluminum sheet scrap. Bending was done in a vice. Even though the cell phone supports had bends larger than the vice, I managed to do it by bending in steps, small angles at each step. If done with care, it looks almost as good as if it was made in one bend.

Step 7: Note on the Electrical Part

It doesn't need a wire drawing for this simple project, since it is just a simple switch turning the outlets on and off. But I wanted it to tell me whether it is on or off (lighting a LED), and since I did not find a cheap switch that could do that, I decided to make it by myself.

Since LEDs need a low voltage source and it would cost a lot to make one only for that, I chose out of many options to make a simple voltage divider to power this LED. But I was concerned that since the division factor is pretty high (>10), it would consume a lot of current. So, to put it on the minimum current consumption I had to design it and I found (by experiment) that I would need something like 1mA to light a LED at a minimum but visible level of lighting.

So I designed a voltage divider for 127V and did not care about rectifying the sine wave, leaving this work to the LED. The diode here is only to reduce the voltage a little bit further. The total power consumed was less than 150mW, which I considered fair, considering that chargers would consume much more than that when turned on.

(Afterwards I noticed that I could simply put the right resistor in series with the led and it would be fine. So, please pardon me for the bad electrical concepts because I'm not a specialist on this!!)

I made a small board to assemble the components together, out from scrap perforated protoboard.

Step 8: Disassemble and Finish/paint

Now, I disassembled everything, taking apart the door from the box. I used polyurethane sealant (Sikaflex 221) to fill the gaps before painting.

I painted it white, and the small metallic parts were painted red, two coating layers.