Allure Outlet

It is often easy to leave your organization levels at a low, but it is very beneficial to have a clean workspace. In this project, I go over my journey and build process of coming up with Allure and making it possible.

I personally own a 3 outlet wall adapter and came across many issues with it. The outlet sides are not optimized to make full use of some sides as well as cables sometimes falling out of sides. It also creates an issue of having messy cables that clog up my cable management below my desk. I needed something that could easily pop in and out so I could plug in my cables that would stay until I needed to take it out. This cannot be simply solved using a power strip due to the bulkiness and issues revolving around the idea that some power bricks may simply block up 2 or more ports.

Here are some sketches I made of the click mechanism and the shape of the outlet. The click mechanism is modeled after a pen. More detail is on the click mechanism in the next step.

I thought of common household items that would click in and out. I thought a pen-clicking mechanism would be perfect. After taking apart a pen, I was able to figure out how a pen click works and model it

The plate is what surrounds the physical outlet that pops in and out. The material should be plastic to prevent shorts, which I will touch on more in the ladder steps.

There is a total of 9 screws that are needed: 3 to connect wires from your house to the outlet, 4 to connect the outlet to the housing of the outlet box, and 2 to connect the plate to the wall. N = Neutral, H = Hot, G = Ground

It is important to spend a lot of time making sure the wiring is correct, especially cause this device connects to your house. If the connections are incorrect, the outlet can short and you would need to repair your breaker box. I have provided a schematic of how an outlet works. There are 3 cables: hot, neutral, and ground. The box surrounding the click mechanism cannot be metal because it would short the outlet. The ground wire is also connected to the housing of the outlet when you disconnect your existing outlet. This is to properly ground the device.

Here are some renders to highlight the functionality of Allure.

This project definitely opened my eyes up to a new way of making objects in CAD. I would like to thank the Autodesk ambassadors that provided wonderful workshops. Although I am new to the Fusion 360 community, I would love to invest more time into these types of projects!