Hacker’s Phone Charger

This project starts a few months ago when one of our members was putting together a class for a girl scout troop. He was teaching them using adafruit trinkets and needed a fairly powerful 5v supply to power them. His Solution was to use some old rear pci slot mounted USB jacks, similar to the image bellow, connected to the 5v supply line of a PC power supply.

One day at the space someone needed to charge their phone so they plugged it in to the jack connected to the power supply. I liked the idea and decided to take it a bit over the top. I used openscad to create a box to hold all the USB jacks along with binding posts that connect to the +12v, +5v, and +3.3v coming out of the power supply. I printed the top and bottom of the box on the 3d printer. and now have an over-the-top hacker phone charger, raspberry pi and everything else power station. Two of the PCI USB slots had status LEDs on them. I added an attiny85 to blink them around in a cycle as just a fun extra feature.

Without further ado here is the finished product.

Here you can see the lights in action

The arduino code along with the stl and openscad files can be found at my github here https://github.com/jeffminton/usb_strip