Back when phones used to ship with chargers in the box, you’d get a plugpack that could charge one device. Aftermarket manufacturers eventually started making chargers with four or five ports which were great for travelling. But what if you wanted to charge even more devices? You might build something like this rig from [DENKI OTAKU].
The goal was to build a charger that could handle 100 devices at once. The charger is designed to charge devices at up to 1.5 amps. That’s no mean feat, as the device would have to be able to deliver 150 amps total when fully loaded. As for the actual design, though, it’s relatively simple. [DENKI OTAKU] simply built a simple USB-C charger PCB based around an off-the-shelf chip which has ten individual chargers on it, and stacked it up ten of those in a housing made out of aluminium extrusion. To deliver the current to run all these chargers, the rig got two massive switching power supplies to feed the charger array a massive amount of current. The open enclosure design here makes sense, in that it probably helps keep everything cool.
The only thing missing from the build video? A heavy-duty test. We’d love to see if it actually holds up under full load with 100 phones connected. We have some suspicions as to whether the traces on the PCBs would hold up under a continuous 15 amp load, for example. Still, if you wanted to provide phone charging en-masse at an event or similar, this kind of simple stacked design could be an easy way to go.
Phone chargers are still moving forward; the last big leap was the adoption of GaN technology. Video after the break.
haha.
the 15A bus trace is fine, even if you base the calculations on the narrowest constriction. most of it is something like 3x wider than necessary for a 10C rise. there’s also a bunch of other copper on the pcb to wick heat away. i’d wager the pcb doesn’t even get warm to the touch.
the power connection is fine, too, as those phoenix plug block thingies are 10A/pin, and he’s doubled them up.
Light up the rig with red LEDs that increases with intensity with increasing amp so you will know when it’s about to go ka-boom.
Not sure if that perspex box will really cut it in the case of thermal runaway. Perhaps a box welded from steel plate with a forced air pump, vent holes and operated outside in the middle of a cement floor courtyard would be a safer option.
I appreciate the concern trolling, it really makes it feel like a hackaday comment section.
All good then!
For those not knowing how much the freedom unit “massive” is:
A little more than 3A on the grid side.
That’s 7A in countries with undervoltage grids, aka 110V. A desktop with a GPU falls into that same “massive” category.
Even in freedom units we don’t measure mass in amps. Their massiveness is about 3 pounds, or in metric, that converts to about 3.50 euros.
“it’s relatively simple. [DENKI OTAKU] simply built a simple USB-C charger”
You managed to use the word simple 3 times in one sentence. Please get an editor.
It’s grammatically correct, and the part you cut off the front makes the entire thing flow okay. Not amazing, but not anything to get hung up on.
That’s two sentences.