A common occurrence out our hackerspace has been phones running out of juice. We did not have an organized USB cord collection and members were often running around looking/asking for the appropriate charge cord for their particular phone. We decided to make a dedicated phone charging station with all the most popular phone charging cords.

Below is the MDF frame that was cut out on a CNC Router. Inside the circle you can see that a lot of material was removed from behind the main panel. This made room for the USB hub that will be used to charge the phones.  There are 4 t-shaped slots that will allow the phone to sit on the shelf and allow the cord to go down through the shelf. There is a quarter-round piece of wood glued on the shelf to prevent the phone from slipping out. This piece will be trimmed on the band saw later.

Below you can see the quarter-round has been trimmed to allow the charging cords to be installed. The frame has been painted with truck bed liner spray paint to give it a textured and rubbery coating. The blue power symbol is also MDF that has been cut out on the router. There are a lot of coats of spray paint on this piece.

Clear plexi glass will be installed behind the power button. The original intent was to scuff the clear plexi glass with sand paper, making it opaque, then lighting the back of the unit so that the plexi would light up. Unfortunately, the plexi glass did not diffuse the light as much as we hoped and you could clearly identify all of the LEDs that were behind the panel. For that reason, the LED idea was scrapped.

Short USB charging cables were used to connect the phones to the USB hub. We tried long cords but it was a wire management nightmare. The charging station is on the wall right next to the main door. We wanted this to be the last thing you saw on your way out so that no one would leave their phone at the ‘space.

Here’s a close up of the shelf slots and charging cords.