MkII Qi Charger Shield

This is thingiverse thing 455895. The openscad and STL file can be found there.

This is the fanatical redesign of the quick and dirty Qi Charger Shield. Instead of being a ring that clips on to the charger to just hide the LED, this is a partial sphere that completely engulphs the charger. The modified Nexus 7 case sits on a ring around the top of the shield, and the Qi charger sticks through the cutout in the back of the the Nexus 7 case. The charger is completely sealed in with no path for light to escape.

The only opening is the hole in the back (well away from the LEDs on the side) to allow the USB cable to be inserted.

I tried to print this in black filament, but apparently my black filament is full of thin spots and stops feeding after a while every time I try to print anything, so I switched back to the natural white. You can see a bit of gray in the first few layers as the last of the black residue was purged.

Here's the charger inside the shell:

Since it is fairly transparent, I'll have to paint it black (when I get some paint). For now you can see just how bright the irritating green LED is even through a few millimeters of plastic.

I used my Matter and Form 3D scanner to scan the Qi charger, but I didn't use the resulting scans directly in the model. I simply used them for reference, doing things like making thin slices at various points to measure the radius, and picking off the location of the USB port and the angle of the charger face. I also whipped out some openscad code to slice my model in half and position the scanned model in the center to check how well it fit so I could tweak things till it looked quite snug.

Meanwhile, I found some really cheap black spray paint at Home Depot, so I'm giving it a try. I'll see if it melts the plastic or something horrible like that...

The spray enamel seemed to work fine. The cheap spray can doesn't cover very well, but I just hit it with a new coat every 20 or 25 minutes for most of the afternoon until it looked pretty uniform.

If I can still see green shining through at night, I'll put a strip of the aluminum duct tape on it next to the LED. I used the same stuff in the TARDIS to keep the light from shining through the side panels.

It works! The paint blocks out the green light completely. If I peer under the Nexus 7 with a dark adapted eye, I can see just a trace of green seeping through the seam between the top of the shell and the bottom of the Nexus 7 case resting on it, but I have to be really close to see anything. Nothing is casting shadows any more :-).

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