My Quest for a Charging Station – Continues…..

Well, it has been quite a while I wrote about how I managed to make a working charging station for myself by using simple and cheap gadgets. Read the article here.

And still I was trying to improvise it. And I have always hated the thought of buying a charging stations which is in some cases more expensive than some of my gadgets which I am going to charge on that station.

So, here comes the improvised version of my charging station. It’s simple and cheap. And it actually comes from a company which sells a charging station for around 4 times the price of the gadget which I used to build mine.

The gadget I used is the Belkin’s 7 Port Powered USB HUB . Don’t mind the price at http://ebay.in. I got it INR700/- at Landmark Gurgaon.

Before we go any further, Let me elaborate on the “keyword” in “7 Port Powered USB HUB”. The key word is indeed the “Powered”. And what does that mean?

Generally the USB HUBs, shares the Ampere of one USB port of your laptop/PC when connected. So this directly means, that when you increase the number of devices connected to it, the Ampere reaching all the devices reduces making many devices un-usable.

Well, here our concern is not that if the device is usable or not. But our concern is, if the ampere reduces, then either the charging time will increase or in worst case the charging will not happen at all. A classic case will be charging an iPad with ur PC’s USB drive. It just becomes too slow. Even the device shows it as not charging.

So, comes the Powered HUBs for rescue. These hubs use external power source (your regular 220V outlet) and gives ample of power to all devices connected to it. And as it gets the power from a wall outlet, there is no need of a PC/Laptop for the charging process.

And best part, it even charges your iPad at the same pace of charging it with an original Apple power adapter.

So, here is what I did.

Here you can see 5 devices currently connected to the USB hub.

1. A Galaxy Tab with its keyboard dock
2. An iPad Original or 1, whatever you wanna call it
3. A Samsung Galaxy S
4. A SE mini pro
5. A Philips Bluetooth headphone with Direct USB port for charging (the white one stuck in the HUB)

And still there are 2 ports empty which would be soon used for my upcoming kindle and a new Android 4 Phone/Tab J !! Hopefully!!!

And in my test/observation, all of them including the iPad took the same time to charge if compared with what it generally takes when charged with dedicated chargers.

Here is a close shot of the Belkin f4u041 7-Port Powered Hub