Charger Stress Relief

Around my school, there is a problem with the ends of chargers being bent too much when plugged in because the charging port is facing away from the outlet, and the wires inside the charger start to show as the outer rubber sleeve is separated from the end of the charger. To solve this, I 3D-printed a little block with an indent that holds the charger straight.

This is my Fusion360 file

caliper

PLA filament

3D printer

this image is my mind map that I made to sort my ideas on paper and think about the design, and what's possible.

To start my design, I made the shape of my tool in CAD. It was the shape of the charger and the height of what's supposed to be the charger's ideal height to keep it level, but the floor that was supposed to hold the charger up was too low and the walls too thin. You can kind of see in the picture above that I broke the walls.

After I realized all the problems with my first product, I went through an iteration process and made multiple different designs and got feedback before printing my final. First, I made one with a higher floor, and it turns out I was measuring without taking into account the width of the rubber around the end of the charger, and the second floor was too high, so I fixed that in my third version.

After fixing the floor height, I then had to fix the length of the middle indent because it was too short, so I fixed that in my fourth version, and then a peer brought it up that I should fillet the edges of it to make sure that if the charger absolutely had to bend, it wouldn't dig into the side of the charger, causing more damage.

After making multiple designs and fixing problems with each one, I printed my final design.

For my final iteration i might add a thing layer of rubber because the floor is still a little lower than the charger port and the straightener could slide out of place and we don't want that.