The end is near. Currently in the Fifth Six Weeks Plugged In has made tremendous progress. Some people are still asking why a charging station is relevant. Consider these questions: has my phone ever died while in a public area, did I have my charger with me, and, if not, what did I do to charge my phone? From personal experience my Galaxy S3 battery can last between 4 to 7 hours depending on how much I’m using it. A huge problem I have struggled with is when my phone is at 50 percent and I know I’m going somewhere later. I will charge it at the 50 percent. This is really bad for your phone, it drains the battery faster. It is better to allow your phone to get really close to dying like around 5 percent and let it charge fully without being on it. As a teenager I understand wanting to be on your phone 24/7 and making sure it’s at 100% all the time. The reason why my rambling is important is because at the Ann Richards School many students and even teachers phones die during the day. A teacher having our Plugged In charging station will allow students to plug up their phone when it gets close to dying. Also since the students are in class, the phone will be able to charge without being interrupted or bothered by the owner because the owner will be learning. Now you see, a charging station sounds pretty cool after all, right? Well enough about why it’s important, the main topic is what has Plugged In done so far?
For the past few weeks we have been working on a model of our prototype. Our team decided to go with having our charging station be made out of acrylic. Currently we are making the prototype out of cardboard because it can simulate our real charging station in its shape and dimensions. Our first model’s dimensions ended up being too big, which helped us decided to cut off an inch on the width and height, and the cubbies where the phones go in. To figure out the correct dimension we took the largest smart phone on the market today and tailored our charging station to fit it. For our model we decided on making each cubby 7 inches by 4 inches.
Today, March 9, 2015, we worked on creating our final prototype with all of the research and development changes. Once completed and tests are successful, we hope to go into production with our retail version within 30 days. Additionally, today Ms. Miesner, our great instructor, gave us a good idea to design our final prototype on the computer so we can use the laser cuter which would make it easier on all of us and more precise when trying to cut the acrylic correctly with the right dimensions. Stay tuned, within the next month we should have a fun on charging station that works! To learn more about charging station these are cool websites to visit: https://www.pinterest.com/lesleylein/project-charging-station/, http://lifehacker.com/tag/charging-station.
StarPathDesign 
I think creating this portable charging station is really great. It will be beneficial to a lot of people seeing as over half of America cant live without their technology anyways. This will be really beneficial to ma anyways because my phone is always dying really fast especially when I’m downtown, I cant go anywhere without my phone being charged. What kind of power source would it have? I really want to see how this works. -Desiree
I agree with Desiree, I feel that this would be a really good prototype to work on. Although, I would have to add on that I think it is a good idea because of the multiple connections that you have. I do believe the difficulty would be finding the connection source as Desiree mentioned and I too wonder how you all will get the power for the connection. In addition, I do not know if this helps but here is a cite where they have portable chargers, and maybe having multiple of them will help. In addition, maybe you would like to charge a battery within the connection so when you put in the battery then it gives the power that enables the connections to charge phones.
Cite : http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/best-portable-battery-chargers/
I think having a portable charger is a great idea. Now with the BYOD, we won’t have to worry about devices dying because we would have the portable charger. It will help many people, in many different ways. It is convinient for others. Even though some people hate to admit it, we are attached to our elecetronics, but it can useful for us. We would just need to find a power source that wull be able to cahrge multiple phones as possible.