The bedside charger setup I’d been using hasn’t worked so well since upgrading to iPhone 12 — the flat sides of the phone make it not sit correctly on the stand unless I’m extra careful, and waking up late because the phone ran out of battery overnight is no fun.
So, time to get one of those new MagSafe chargers and build my own!
This is just a first working prototype in draftboard… I’ll probably go through a round or two of refinement before making a final version with nicer materials. But it works!
The bottom is two layers, with a cavity hollowed out by deeply engraving both sides. That makes room to route the iPhone and Watch cables nicely, and a little space to sandwich in a random cheap Qi charger part (found on AliExpress) below the space for setting AirPods down.
Pulling the iPhone off the MagSafe charger takes some force… to make the stand hold itself down against that I’d need to fill the base with lead or something. So instead I use some nano suction tape to non-permanently adhere it to the bedside table.
The only downside to this whole endeavor is that the whole thing needs three cords and three USB power sockets… I’m a programmer, not an electrical engineer.