Laptop Charging Station

Things You've Made
1

Okay, so a quick background on this project: I’m the vice president of our local makerspace. Our makerspace isn’t open yet. In fact, we were actually in the middle of opening when COVID hit. We’ve been using this time to really organize all of our equipment.

One thing we are organizing is our laptops. We have 6 laptops and needed a central place for them to charge.

I figured this would be a good project for my Lowrider2 CNC. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any laptop charging station files, so I decided to create one.

I’ve just finished drawing this, and now I need to go to work, so CAM and cutting will come later.

Here is the journey so far:

I first looked up laptop charging stations…
buy

I found the above photo and decided to base my design on it.

laptop_charging_station
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Since we only have 6 laptop workstations, this is the design I came up with.

The most tedious part of the design process was, of course, the dog bones…

dog_bone
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And of course the model is fully parametric, allowing you to change the wood thickness, bit diameter, width, and number of slots, and slot tolerance.

Anyway, I’ll update once I CAM it out and get to cutting!

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I’m not sure anyone has ever been that happy using a laptop charging station :smiley:

Maybe you are using fusion, but in Estlcam you can pick which inside corners end up with overcuts. So you don’t have to muck with it in CAD.

The design looks pretty good. If I were offering a bit of unsolicited advice, it would be to keep more clearance than you think you need. There’s no reason for them to be tight, and a few mm looks huge in CAD and on calipers, but with real wood and laptops, a half finger’s width is much more casual.

Looks like an awesome design though, and it will really be great in a makerspace. I hope you all do well. If you have any interesting makerspace stories, I think you’d find a lot of interested readers here. Similar spirit, for sure. :+1:

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I agree 100% - that’s why I’ve made it adjustable. Even the material, which I have tentatively set to just 0.750", is likely not correct. I plan to adjust the model when I get the material. Great advice though!

This right here is gold! I was not aware. I have used Estlcam (only because it is what is recommended here) and I liked it. I am used to fusion cam though and it’s what I intended to use…interesting though. It sure would save a lot of time!

I’m also aware there is a dog bone plugin for fusion, but I normally don’t design “flat-pack” items and it isn’t something common to my workflow - though, I’ll have to start since I now have a CNC machine in my garage :wink:

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