Adam Spontarelli

Some things I've done in the maker community

Charging Station

A variety of odd ways to charge your phone

Summer 2017

electronics, wood, metal


The local Friday Cheers concert series asked me to build a phone charging station for their attendees. I thought this sounded incredibly boring, so I countered with the idea that this charging station would be require users to input their own energy and learn something about science at the same time. For some reason they accepted.

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The charging station is a wooden table on a metal stand, and in the center are the electronics, with charging ports on each side. Each port is powered by a different mechanism. There's a bike connected to a car alternator, a window weight on a pulley system that you crank up into the air and allow to fall, a microphone that you yell at in order to vibrate a piezoelectric device (this generates practically zero electricity, but technically some), a Peltier cooler that you can set your beer on to induce a temperature gradient (almost as bad as the microphone), a drum set you could play to also make use of vibration, and a solar panel that stopped working about an hour into the concert when the sun set.

Needless to say, people hated it. I still get a laugh out of people realizing how much energy it takes to charge their phones.