The Worlds FIRST Clear Wireless Charger - Epoxy Encased Electronics?
What is up, everybody? Today's video is going to be a little bit of a two on one experience. You see, I have the world's toilet first world problem that I would like to solve. And then I also have a burning question that I would like to answer. Every week I sit right here at my desk and I record the off the cut podcast livestream, and I like to use my phone as a way to monitor the chat here on YouTube, but it's kind of hard to read the screen at that angle, and also it just drains the battery really quickly.
So what I'd like to do is create a wireless vertical charging stand for it so that I can see it easier and it charges the phone at the same time. So that's the problem. And now let's talk about the science experiment.
I have been obsessed with the concept of see through electronics ever since I got my hands on the first Gameboy Color and it got me thinking. Could I increase small, low wattage electronics in clear epoxy? I mean, think about it. If you could. You could create an almost crystal clear case for whatever electronic gizmo it is you wanted, so long as the epoxy isn't too much of an insulator, and so long as it doesn't discolor with heat.
And well, frankly, there are quite a few ways that this could go wrong, but that's what makes it such a fun science experiment. We're going to take a wireless charger teardown in cases of epoxy and then hope that it doesn't melt itself down. All righty. Now that we are here in the shop, step number one on this build is going to be well, actually, you know what? I already did.
Step number one, I came out here a couple of days ago and I cast this solid block of clear epoxy. This guy is going to be the basis for the case for our wireless charger. So in as few words as possible, here is the plan for this block. We are going to use ACNC to roll out an area on it that's big enough for all the electronic components in a wireless charger. We're going to put those components in. We are going to cast it back up to the top filled with poxy, and hopefully it'll still remain relatively clear.
Guys ready for this? We are very much in uncharted territory right now. I have never run a poxy through the CMC, so I'm kind of curious to see how this goes. But I'm also a little bit scared. Turn that on. There we go. Now, I'm sure many of you at home are thinking that this is kind of a weird way of tackling this project. And you're wrong. I kind of had some ulterior motives for doing it this way.
I have an upcoming build where I want to mill some epoxy blocks. So this was also kind of a test run for that. And by the way, you might want to get subscribe. So you don't miss that video because I think it's going to be pretty cool if this is it, you, that's it. You know what? That actually cut a lot nicer than I thought it would.
After a quick cleanup, I noticed that there were some pretty aggressive tooling marks on the block. So to give this method the best possible chance of working, I grabbed my dye grinder along with some fine grit sandpaper and did my best to smooth them all out. And pretty quickly I was reminded of just how much of a mess a poxy can make. Well, we are down to a light haze instead of a mess of tool marks. So what we have to do now is disassemble this donor wireless charger.
This is just a cheap one that I got off Amazon. I think it's like 15, 16 bucks, something like that. So we're going to tear down and see how to fix. Wireless chargers are a marvel of modern engineering, but thankfully for me, their internals are actually relatively simple.
Once you prior way inside the case, there's an induction coil, a control board, and that's about it. So I set the case aside and then I realized that I should probably test the thing. I feel like I would be remiss if I didn't at least test to make sure that this wireless charger actually worked inside of its case.
So I've got a status LRT. That's good. Let's see if I just hover the phone above it.
So right about there, it starts charging. So you can see I'm like half inch away from the coil. That's pretty significant.
I was about to start casting, and then I realized that I should probably also give the USB cable the whole teardown treatment too. So I grabbed a sharp knife and carefully peeled back the insulating plastic to reveal the wires and the bare metal connector so that we got the teardown done. It's time to seal up this thing so that we can cast some new epoxy in here. So we're gonna put that in there like that. So we just got to seal up this little area here.
To start, I use some red duct tape to do most of the heavy lifting. This stuff is awesome for working with epoxy because it won't stick to it at all. However, it is kind of tough to make an epoxy tight seal with it around a cable. So to make sure this thing was really well sealed, I grabbed some fast drying latex caulking and applied that as well. Okay, cool. Just give that a few minutes to dry.
And while we're waiting for that to happen, let's mix up some epoxy for this build. I'm using flow cast epoxy because it's just super easy to use. No need to torch it. No vacuum port necessary because it cures over the course of 72 hours.
So there's just plenty of time for all the bubbles to work their way out on their own. Okay. It looks like it's actually filling out a lot of those tool marks. I'm so pumped on this. So at this point, I don't really think there's anything left that we can do here other than just wait for the epoxy to cure. But that's okay because I'm pretty sure that there's a very special package waiting back at home from the sponsor. Today's video, you know, some people might say that trying to make your own clear wireless charger is kind of bespoke, just like today's sponsored bespoke post.
So what is bespoke post? Well, it's a monthly membership club delivering awesome boxes of top shelf goods from under the radar brands. They actually sent me three of their boxes inside this bigger, larger box, and we're going to unbox them together and see what's inside. Okay.
So box number one here, this is the console. And this is a very nice looking look at this Damascus steel blade. That is so nice. This is perfect because I have been looking for an everyday carry knife for just doing stuff around the house.
Yeah, I'm going to get a lot of you set this now on to the next one. So when you first signed up with Bespoke Post, you complete an online questionnaire and tell them about all the things that you're into. And then every month they put together boxes of goods, 90% of which come from small businesses, and many of those are based in the US. Each box has around $70 in value, but you pay only a fraction of that. Next up, I feel like this is continuing the theme of everyday carry because we have the carry.
Oh, there's a quite a bit in this one sheet. That's a lot. We've got this nice wallet here, like really slim and simple.
I like that. I also have a gold roller ball pen, which will be perfect for me, taking notes and drawing designs. And then finally, oh, we have a nice Gerber multi-tool. That's awesome. And the best part about this whole thing is that you only pay for what you actually want. Each month they show you a preview of the box before it gets shipped to you and you decide if you want to keep it, swap it for something else, or just skip that month entirely.
This is the last box and it is mint. It's by far the biggest. This is the Weekender. But I think I might just call this thing the week dare. I am constantly taking changes of clothes with me to the shop in case I need to go somewhere afterwards and look presentable. And I think this is perfect for that.
So if you would like to sign up, go to the link in the video description and use coupon codes bills to save 20% off your first box or go to bespoke postcards slash builds. All right, let's go see if our epoxy is cured now. Oh, right. So it is a few days later. Our epoxy is nice and cured.
But unfortunately, I think we are going to have to file this attempt under the heading of close but no cigar. When you look at it from this angle, it actually looks pretty good. I mean, here you have this ring around it, but that's just the height difference between this intersection and the outer section. However, when you rotate it like this or maybe like that would be a little bit easier for you to see. There's just the hint of a line where the bottom of it and the side of it is from the carving. Before, I could probably make this look pretty good, but I want it to look really good.
I want it to look perfect. So I think we're going to go back to the drawing board and try again on this. So real quick, I made a new casting vessel by cutting down a bunch of melamine, screwing it together, and then wrapping it all in red tape. If you're on a budget, this is probably the cheapest and easiest way to make an epoxy casting form.
However, if you don't mind spending a few bucks, I'd check out an HDP form or even a silicone one. The tricky thing about this is that we're going to have to do it in to pause and between each pore, we're going to have to wait 72 hours. So it's going to be kind of time consuming.
But I think this should work much better. And truth be told, I probably should have just done it this way from the start, but as I say, you live and you learn. So again, I mixed up some more flow casts, filled up the form to approximately the halfway mark and then left it to cure for the next three days.
Once it had, I drilled a hole just above the level of the poxy to feed my USB cable through, connected that to the wireless charger and then sealed the hole using some more latex caulking. So a third attempt at this port. Let's see how it goes this time. Now, full cast is actually quite good about releasing bubbles over time because it cures so slowly. But I am going to agitate this just a little bit in order to try and work out any bubbles that might be trapped underneath the wireless charger by not being completely necessary. But it should make for a better final product three days later.
Alrighty. It's a little over 72 hours and that means we can officially demoed this thing and see how it looks. But from the outside it is looking really good. I'm excited. Casey Kids, how I know this one's going to be a little tricky to get off here.
I think now it'll just peel this thing some sort of weird fruit. Would you look at that? That is a really clean and really clear casting. So the next thing we have to do is the first real test battery brick, USB cable. Let's see if this thing still turns on even. Oh, oh, I see a blue light. I think we're still functional.
I think this epoxy is a little too thick right now in order to actually get a wireless charging signal through it. So why don't we build this thing down to a more reasonable size? The nice thing about epoxy is that it cuts pretty similar to wood, so I was able to use my table saw to trim down three sides of my epoxy block. The other nice thing about it is that it's clear so you can see the blade through it as it's cutting it, which is really cool and definitely not something that you can say.
Hmm. It would. All right. So that's pretty good for height and width.
Now let's do thickness because this block is so small, it's not really safe to plane down on its own. So I use some double sided tape to stick it to a slide. And for good measure, I also tape down the USB cable. Then I ran it through my drum center a whole bunch of times.
Once I had it plane within a quarter inch or so of the induction coil, I flipped the block over and did the same thing to the other side. Now that is much more like the thickness that I had originally imagined for this project. Monolithic slabs are so 2001. So to add a little bit of details on this charger, I chamfer the outside edges. And then to really step things up, I cut the corners with a minus off, which I think gives a whole block an almost gem like appearance.
Now, that is looking a little bit more like what I had originally imagined for this project. So I want to make a wood base for this thing that is going to hold it at angle, something like that. And figuring out how to do that was actually surprisingly hard. But let me show you what I came up with.
This helicopter flying directly over above the shop right now, which is incredibly weird. I don't know if that picked up on my microphone or not, but was really live for me. So this is a jig that I made that will allow me to run my rotor at a 15 degree angle. I just press it in there like that and I can scoot it along like that.
So, so sounds pretty complicated. It was a little hard to figure it out, but hopefully it should all work. So it helicopter coming back is seriously. I mean I couldn't just close the door of the shop at its height today. The trick to getting this setup to work was using my trim rotor, kind of like a CMC, slowly lowering it into the wood and cutting the channel in many passes.
Trying to cut too much material in a single pass is a great way to kill your router. It asked me how I know. Oh no. And I break it with the channel cut. I then had to drill a couple of holes in the bottom of the slab to fit the USB cable through.
Just throw this through here and then should be able to mark out the last little bit that I need to choose load because I was using a round rotor bit. The channel that I cut had rounded ends, which wasn't a very good fit for my gym, cut a slab. So I very carefully chiseled out the last little bit of wood. One time viewers of the channel know that I am not great with hand tools, so I was definitely a bit worried about messing this part up. Okay, moment of truth time.
Let's see if this fits. Okay, now I'm starting to get excited. That looks even better than I thought it would. A couple of quick cuts on the Minotaur and I had a perfectly sized base on my wireless charger. So that is not bad, looking at all.
However, I got to say, I'm not a fan of some of the hard edges on this thing. I think it's a little too much, especially with a crystal looking wireless charger. So let's take this outside and make it look a little bit more organic. It's been a long time since I've gotten a chance to do any power carving.
Last time I did, it was all my Facebook Live Edge Side table, and this application is basically the same. I use my cuts all this to carve away at the wood and by following the natural grain of it, I was able to create a decently convincing faux live edge. I then cleaned off the carving works with my sandal and moved over to the rotor table to cut a channel on the bottom of the stand.
In retrospect, this was probably not the best way to do it. As you can see, the cut is pretty rough. But again, you live and you learn. Let's do a little test fit here. I want to be careful. This cable falls through there like so cable roots down through there like that.
We have ourselves a nice clean setup with the cable management worked out, we are free to move on to finishing and I actually got a new finish to play with today. We are going to be using Osmo. I've had a few people recommend this to me over the last six months or so, so I figured I'd get a hand and try it out. Apparently the best way to apply this stuff is with a little scotch-brite pads here and try that out.
Barely even put that in there. I like the look of it already. I actually bought the Osmo with the intention of using it on a larger project, but I always like to try to run new finishes on smaller stuff first. That way I can get a feel for it and if I need to send it back and start again, I can. And it's not that much work. Now we're moving on to the next thing, which is trying to restore the crystal clear clarity of our epoxy.
I'm feeling this might take a little patch. This is the part of the build that I was least looking forward to. Polishing epoxy is just plain labor intensive.
I started by running through all of the standing grids on my random orbital sander from 80 straight through to 400. And you can see that I'm actually using a folded up cloth to protect the opposite side from scratching itself on the table, as I said it. Epoxy is so soft that you really have to watch out for little things like this. Then it was on to wet sanding with higher grit. If you've never wet sanded before, it's exactly what it sounds like.
It's sanding plus water. The idea here is that the water acts as a lubricant and helps to remove dust and debris that can cause swirl marks. Gator actually makes a special sandpaper that doesn't fall apart when it gets wet specifically for applications like this. So I started with 600 Grit and I moved up to 1200, and then I finally finished on 2000 Grit and then to really take it home, I grabbed my polisher and used a little bit of automotive polish to polish in. Okay, so it took me a while, but that is looking for a really clear look and see you through it. I'm going to put a very thin layer of Osmo on here in order to protect it, because I'm worried the epoxy is quite soft and might get scratched over time.
I'll be honest, I don't know how well the Osmo stuck to the epoxy because I didn't see much of a change after applying it. I've seen a lot of other creators use it in similar applications to good effect. So maybe it is working and it's just so clear that it's basically invisible. All right.
So that is now all looking pretty clear. I've got two coats of Osmo on here. If I'm being perfectly honest, there are still some very small, like little micro scratches I could probably keep polishing. But then I remembered I don't even know if this thing works yet.
So what we're going to do now is piece this thing together. We're gonna do the last couple of steps, and then we're going to take it home and test it out in order to secure the slab to the base. I used a little bit of brown k glue. This stuff is from Star Bond and it's fantastic because you can get it in a whole bunch of different colors and color match it to whatever you're working on, which is kind of handy in a build like this because of all the clear epoxy. But you guys get it.
You can see what's going on here. As a final step, I use some hot glue on the underside of the stand to secure the cable and position and to keep it from flexing and potentially breaking over time because the cable is cast right into the epoxy. If it broke, I would be kind of screwed. The glue is now dry. So what do you guys say we do? A little preliminary test here? I'm pretty sure the charger is still going to work. Yes, it does. The blue light comes on.
Now, let's see if it goes through epoxy. It goes through epoxy. So now the real question is, will this thing melt itself down over the course of fully charging a cell phone? Sure, it works for a minute, but can it work for two, 3 hours at a time? I don't know.
Let's go home and find it. All right. So here we are back at home. I have my phone here,
which I have conveniently drained down to about 30% battery. I have the wireless charger and we are going to see if we can charge this thing all the way back up to full without this melting down. I know this is, you know, a pretty simple test, but I am genuinely excited to see what the results of it are going to be. What do you guys think? Is this going to work or not? There we go. Okay. So the phone says it's charging now and it's going to take approximately one hour and 52 minutes for a full charge.
I had kind of forgotten how slow wireless chargers are. So while we wait, one thing that I noticed is that the speed of the wireless charger depends on the type of USB port that it's plugged into. So earlier I had it plugged into a USB port on my monitor, but it was only giving me very slow wireless charging. So then I plugged it into this battery bank here, which has a USB power delivery and it dramatically sped it up. So it definitely depends what you have a plugged into and I feel like rapid charging is going to generate more heat.
So this is kind of like a worst case scenario. So I don't know, guys, this is turning out to be a little underwhelming. Both the phone and the wireless charger are not really heating up that much, but we were 22% into this charge, so about a quarter of the battery and this thing is barely even beyond lukewarm. Roll of hook. I got so bored waiting for this thing to charge that I actually just went and took a little nap.
But we are now at 98% charged. So at this point, I think it's safe to say that, yes, you can encase a wireless charger in a poxy and it'll still work or can you? Because one of the things I was worried about outside of it, just not working in general is the epoxy starting to discolor. So let's get this phone out of here. Let's take a closer look.
I'm looking around all of the chips and the coil itself, and honestly, I don't see anything. It looks pretty immaculate. And frankly speaking, I've only had the phone off this for like ten, 15 seconds and it's already cooled down really significantly.
It's warm to the touch and you can tell that it's like there's definitely heat there, but it's by no means hot. Well, there we have it. I mean, it works. I'm honestly kind of surprised about that. But now that I know that this does work, this opens up a lot of possibilities.
In fact, maybe some of you guys could comment down below and let me know if there's anything that you would like to see encased in epoxy, because I definitely want to do more projects like this now. Unfortunately, due to the experimental nature of this project, I didn't really finish it to the normal level of quality that I would like. I mean, first off, just the design. I think I really should have added a little lip here such that the phone doesn't have a tendency to slide off like that. I mean, it's not that big a deal, but it would have been nice.
And then the epoxy job I did is just not that great. There's a little piece of sports caught in here. There's some glue left over on the coils.
You can see some microbubbles in here. Honestly, I just should have been a little bit more diligent when I was doing the epoxy work. Oh, and like I said before, I probably should have sanded this and polished it for a little bit longer. But all of that being said, I am extremely happy with how this turned out, especially as a proof of concept, and I am very happy to have it on my desk. And on that note, I think this video has probably run its course. So thank you so much for watching.
Big thank you. Big, big thank you to all my Patreon supporters. You guys are the best. Big thank you to eco policy for consulting on me and consulting on me, consulting with me on this project even though I'm pretty sure they didn't think it would work. And yeah.
Links for everything I use will be done in the video description. All right. That's it for me, guys. I'll see you in the next one. Get.
2022-09-25 21:32
