Nexus 7 (2013) QI charging frame

I bought this inductive QI charger which is designed for cell phones, but also charges my Nexus 7 tablet. The only problem is that the tablet needs to be precisely centered to be charged, which takes a bit of effort to get exactly right, and if it’s bumped off center it stops charging. So I built this frame that sits over the top of the charger and holds my tablet exactly centered over the charging coil.

It’s made up of 3 layers of laser cut plywood, one around the charger, and two identical ones to frame the tablet. It even has nice finger slots to make it easy to remove, a feature I identified as necessary in my cardboard prototyping stage….

You can download the files from Thingiverse @ https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2734516

 

Laser Etched Thinkpad Laptop

Laser Cut Laptop, edge view
I used a laser cutter to decorate my “home” laptop. Using an Epilog Mini 45 watt laser cutter / engraver, I was able to cut out a good 0.5mm from the rubberized plastic coating on my Thinkpad X31’s cover. To get the cut this deep, I used 100% power and 5% laser speed at 300dpi, which took over 70 minutes, but the results are well worth the wait! Compare this to my laptop paint job on the “work” laptop.