Introduction: CNC Wireless/non Wireless Phone Charging Station

By
About: Father of 2 small humans with crazy ideas that I have to make a reality.

So last Christmas i made a friend of mine a wireless charging station for both her iphone and her apple watch. After seeing the final product my wife instantly wanted one but wanted a different design and want too bothered about the wireless charging.

I wanted to create a very simple and short instructable to show my basic approach to creating both. In the images, the one with the A in the corner and the phone and watch is the version without the wireless charging capability and the one with MJA has a built in wireless charger along with the watch charger to the side.

Both of these were designed using Aspire https://www.vectric.com/products/aspire and cut using the Workbee CNC machine by Ooznest https://ooznest.co.uk/

ASPIRE SOFTWARE

Aspire is an amazing piece of software that creates 3d cutting files for CNC machines. Aspire provides a powerful but intuitive software solution for creating and cutting parts on a CNC router. There are tools for 2D design and calculation of 2D toolpaths such as Profiling, Pocketing, and Drilling as well as 2.5D toolpaths including; V-Carving, Prism carving, Moulding Toolpaths, Fluting and even a decorative texturing strategy.

What makes Aspire our premium package is the added 3D design tools which enable you to create your own 3D relief models and machine them with 3D machining strategies. Aspire’s unique 3D modeling tools coupled with the comprehensive set of 2D design and editing tools make it easy to create your own 2D and 3D parts from scratch as well as the ability to import and edit external 2D and 3D data.

THE WORKBEE CNC

The WorkBee is Ooznest's flagship CNC Machine and a culmination of all their experience, feedback, and suggestions from designing CNC Machines over the past 5+ years. The WorkBee is capable of accurately cutting foams, woods, plastics or aluminium at depths greater than 25mm and to a 0.2mm accuracy or greater. With a WorkBee CNC Kit you can manufacture engineering parts, toys and signs. In fact, you can make anything you can imagine without leaving the workshop.

Step 1: Using Aspire With the Workbee CNC by Ooznest

So creating the tool paths for the Workbee CNC machine using Aspire is really simple as it has all of the basic tools available in the software to create basically anything you want.

Once you have the design finished you can easily open the tool path section on the right and create your tool paths. A tool path is essentially what the CNC machine reads and uses to cut the design to create. You can see in the images that both of the designs have multiple tool paths that will be saved as two separate files, one using a 3mm router bit and one using 0.25" router bit.

Aspire makes it so easy to create these designs from start to finish.

1. Use the tools on the left to create the design

2. Create the tool paths by selecting what you want to cut and selecting what size router bit your using for that specific part

3. Save the tool paths to your computer

4. Use the software created by Ooznest, upload the file and start cutting.

I wont go into to much detail as the perimeters will be different for every person, such as wood type, size, phone size etc.

Step 2: Finishing

After the Workbee CNC had finished cutting the two products, i installed the watch chargers into the slots cut for them to sit and secured them with hot glue.

After a bit of sanding the none wireless charging version was pretty much finished, all that was then needed was to run the cables around and add a foot to the back to make it stand.

With the wireless charger version i bought a small wireless charger from ebay and took all of the plastic casing off which left the small circuit board and charging coil. During the design process in Aspire, i turned the piece over and cut an area out of the back big enough to fit the charger in and made sure to leave 1.5mm of material which is thin enough to allow the charger to work through the wood.

After i installed the electronics and sanded the whole thing i then added some left over walnut strips around the outside and added a small piece of leather to the bottom to cover everything,

It was a Christmas present and shipped to the USA so i unfortunately dont have anymore images of it.

Hope you like the idea and please feel free to ask questions.