Close
0%
0%

The Charginator

Upcycle your old ATX power supply into this 11-port QC-compatible charging monstrosity!

Similar projects worth following
I do relatively often find myself in a situation (mostly on out summer camp), when there's a lot of people who want to charge their phone, but there isn't that many sockets. Or just at home, when I am leaving for a trip, I usually need to charge about 5 - 7 USB devices. So sure, you could use a ton of extension cords and chargers, but I devised a more elegant solution. The board I designed has a 24-pin molex connector, so you just plug your old ATX power supply into it and it provides 4 QC3.0-compatible USB ports, 6 standart USB ports (with support for BCP, Apple, etc. ) and 1 standby port. Each USB port is individually fused with a polyfuse. The board has dummy load resistors for all three (3.3, 5, 12 V) major supply lines, maybe it's not needed, but I wanted to be extra safe, since equipment worth a couple hundred dollars might be plugged into it. It also has the power switch, status LEDs, screw terminals for powering some additional stuff and header terminal for the s

Ok, I explained the purpose of this project in the header, now lets get technical.

The four leftmost ports are compatible with QC3.0 (up to 24 W per port, 12 V 2 A), FCP (Huawei), DCP (Apple) and BCP (Battery Charging Protocol). They take +12 V from the PSU and step it down (if needed) using the 4 FR9885 buck converter ICs. It's basically my Quick Charge 3.0 board, just quadrupled. The IC taking care of all the protocols is the FP6601  (I got mine from LCSC).

The remaining six ports are connected to the +5 V from the PSU, so no buck conveter is needed. They are still equipped with the FP6601, just to enable the devices to draw up to 2 A from each port (otherwise, some would draw just 500 mA).

Lastly, there's one port connected to the +5 V stand-by line. This port can provide power even when the PSU is off, and it's again equpped with the FP6601 port controller.

The board also contains three dummy load resistors, on/off switch, two LEDs, screw terminals (providing 3.3 V, 5 V, 12 V) and a 6 pin header terminal, providing symmetrical supply (±5 V and ±12 V).

The entire board might look complicated, but that's because everything is there at least 4 times. It took me only about two hours to hand-assemble it. I also printed a simple bracket and mounted it to an old power supply I got from a Dell computer.

All the files (Eagle, gerbers, ...) are available on GitHub.

  • Possible upgrades

    Martin04/01/2020 at 13:16 0 comments

    Just some thoughts on possible future revisions:

    • the FP6601's for the QC part could be powered directly from the +5 V rail, saving about 6 passive components.
    • I used a 4.7 nF capacitors across the top resistors in the resistive dividers to minimize noise, so maybe add these as a footprint.
    • it would be really cool to mount a Power Delivery USB-C on this board.

    Anyways, if enough people are interested, I might do a run with machine assembly (the boards are not complicated or expensive, but it's tedious to do it by hand). If you are interested, let me know in the comments.

View project log

Enjoy this project?

Share

Discussions

Martin Cejp wrote 11/18/2021 at 23:38 point

Nice project! Just wondering, what is the purpose of the load resistors?

  Are you sure? yes | no

Ken Yap wrote 11/19/2021 at 00:11 point

They present a minimum load to the SMPS. Many SMPS designs will not regulate below a low threshold.

  Are you sure? yes | no

Similar Projects

Does this project spark your interest?

Become a member to follow this project and never miss any updates