WIP: Galaxy Note 2 Car Dock

While I'm waiting for parts for my humanoid robot, I got started on another project I've been wanting to do.

As you may have seen in my previous posts, I installed a tablet into the Genesis Coupe. While it has been great with it's OEM look and offline navigation ability, there are some small issues and some features missing that I would like in a car dash system. I'll describe some of the issues later on, but in an attempt to resolve these issues and to unite all of my electronics, I've decide to swap out the tablet and replace it with a dock for my Galaxy Note 2.

The first thing I thought about for the dock was a way to charge my phone. Using a cable to charge it makes it impractical as the small opening of the bezel would not have much room for me to maneuver my phone to plug into a charge cable. It also would make it look inelegant to have a charging cable sticking out. Instead, I'm going to take advantage of the wireless charging receiver I already installed onto my Note 2 (see here). I had to test to make sure that the wireless charger could provide enough current to keep up as the Note 2 would be connected to my car's bluetooth system and running GPS. I also wanted to see if the wireless charger's magnets could hold the phone in place while going over bumps and other forces occured while driving so I made a prototype dock.

The test dock was made out of foamcore.

I measured out the dimensions of the Note 2 and cut out pieces to surround my phone.

I measured and cut out the hole for the Touchstone wireless charger.

And then put the dock together using hot glue and pins.

I placed a small scrap piece of a screen protector over the charger to make sure charging works, as I plan to cover the charger with a matte screen protector on the final product to hide the location of the charger.

To be able to adjust the angle of the dock and temporarily place it on my car's wind shield to test, I used a spare GPS suction cup mount to grab onto the charger. It ended up taking me about 20-25 minutes to make this. I had to drive a friend to the airport the next day so it was a perfect chance to test out the dock and charger over a long period of time. I attached the dock to my wind shield and angled it the same angle it would be when it its permanently mounted in the bezel.

After 2 hours with Google Navigation on, bluetooth connected to my car and streaming music to it, the phone lost about 5% battery even though it was charging. That was not good, but it was not too bad either. Ideally, I'd want the charger to actually charge the phone but losing 2.5% an hour wasn't too bad. That is about the same drain I get using the phone normally without charging it. To improve the charge rate, I'd have to switch to using Qi compliant chargers and receivers which charges at a rate of 1000mA versus the Touchstone's 500mA. I plan to do this as soon as Qi chargers become cheaper and more readily available.

For now, the Touchstone charger should be fine for the short trips I do normally. Now its time to make the more permanent mount. I decided to make sketches of my ideas and then a CAD model of my mount to provide myself with a clear picture of the final product.

Those were some quick sketches I made with my Note 2 and below is the rough CAD model of the system.

Parts of the dock

The dock retracted

Here are videos of how it works. The first one includes the phone to see the whole system while the second video shows it without the phone so you can see what is actually going on.

The way the moving base moves and locks is by using the clicking mechanism from a pen. The tip of a pen extends or retracts based on if you clicked the pen cap. One problem however, was that the pen cap does not extend and retract enough for the moving base to extend and retract the thickness of the Note 2 so that it always stays flush with the frame.

A normal pen has a retraction/extension of about 6mm while I needed it to extend 10mm, the thickness of the Note2. I looked at how the pen mechanism works and figured out that all I had to do was extend the channels that the pen cap goes through. To do this, I took 2 pens and cut the middle of the channels and then  combined the two together

Now it has the exact extension length I want.

Next is to make the frame using more permanent materials. I will be using 5mm and 13mm sheets of Lexan.