Phone Charging Stand
For my final project for my first semester of mechanical engineering, we had to design a phone stand. The stand I designed incorporated my wireless charger and became my go-to charging station. I recently got a new phone which does not support wireless charging, so I decided to make a new charging stand that was compatible with a charger I had on hand.
The first thing I did in the project was accurately model the charging cable. Once I had a model of the charger, I extruded the general shape of the stand around the cable using a sweep boss. I then went through and cut all the necessary sweeps and cavities.
I had to separate the stand into two pieces so that I could insert the cable in some way. This was the most difficult part. The features were simple but thinking about how to get the geometry was harder than expected. I put half dove-tails in each half of the stand so that they could be slid together but not pulled apart.
The model works very well in practice. Once the rails are lined up the model snaps shut around the cable with a satisfying click. The stand supports the phone perfectly well and looks extremely sleek and minimal while sitting on my desk. It feels very natural putting the phone on or taking it off the stand, it honestly just works really well.
This project seems simple but is actually one of the harder models I’ve made. I’ve never built a model around an object as I did for this one so learning how to do that took some time. I really like the final product and I will definitely make use of this technique again.