We replaced the kitchen iPad with a newer model, which meant its drop-in charging station was no longer useful. I started looking at multi-device chargers, but realized I could just as well build my own.
The body is one piece of medium cherry plywood wrapped around on itself, and a few supporting bits of the same material, and shelves of thick green class acrylic. All joinery, no glue — it should come apart to change out the power supply if needed… then again, a couple of the draftboard prototypes came apart in ways that won’t go back together, so I guess we’ll see.
There’s a MagSafe puck on the front for recent iPhones, and room to stand a couple of other devices. The back shelf is tall enough that a Smart Keyboard Folio (for ~11-inch iPads) can hang over it if you don’t want to keep it on the iPad.
Hiding inside is a Satechi 4-port USB-C charger with enough wattage to charge a MacBook Pro (though I haven’t tested whether the shelves will support one) and then some.
One of the ports goes to the MagSafe puck, and the others are a mix of Lightning and USB-C short cables so there’s always the right plug for whatever wants to go on the shelf.
The power cable routes around so it can come out the back (through a gap in the living-hinge curve), though it’s a bit of a trick to get the connector to bend within the space I gave it.
The living-hinge curve should also give the charger brick at least a bit of ventilation. (Although I’m not really worried about running it too hot since most of the time it won’t have enough power-hungry devices connected to run even close to 165 W.)
Got an add on and then I would love to buy your design files. LED light to illuminate the acrylic. I would love this idea with my company logo glowing.
Welcome to the community. If someone sells their designs,( hopefully) they will have a link to their online store in their profile. Any designs to be shared for free (personal use only) would be shared in the free laser design category in the forum.
As for your thought about illuminating parts of this… the charger I built this around already has a status LED, so if one wanted to tweak this design it might not be difficult to align an acrylic part to pick up and transmit that light. That’s perhaps best left as an exercise for the reader though.
medium cherry plywood wrapped around on itself, and a few supporting bits of the same material, and shelves of thick green class acrylic. All joinery, no glue — it should come apart to change out the power supply if needed… then again, a couple of the draftboard prototypes came apart in ways that won’t go back together, so I guess we’ll see.
