My goal for week 8 was to build the charging dock for the button. As I explained in the previous post (read here) I bought a 30x30cm black marble tile with the purpose of using that instead of the chunky 3D model I created previously. I made this choice because I consider it much more suitable for luxury hotel rooms, definitely more high-end & stylish. The first thing I did was to cut the tile into a 9x9cm square: for doing this I’ve used a diamond saw for cutting tiles. During the process, I left the tile in the water so that it didn’t break. Because of the compressed, fragile nature of tile, it can crack, break and fragment when you try to cut it. The end result was good in terms of size, however, it didn’t look great at the borders where it was all cracked. To fix this problem I started to polish the tile on the sides by using a tool that looked like a cheese grater and each side had a different level of precision. This process took quite some time: I started with the side with 300 grits, then 400, 500 and finally 600. After this it looked so much better, however, the side of the marble tile weren’t quite as shiny as the top, therefore I decided to go the extra mile and use different sand paper up to 1000 grits. The final result was really good and the tile now is black on all sides (apart from the bottom)!!

The following step was to engrave a circle on the top of the tile with the same diameter as the inductive copper charger. To do this I used the laser cutter and to be honest I was really impressed with the quality of the cut. Both I and the technician were actually wondering if this method worked or not with marble. It did and it was perfect!! We did the same for the bottom of the time where I needed some space for the microchip.

Now things started to get a bit more complicated as I had to drill a hole inside of the cut all the way to the other side of the tile in order to allow the two copper cables to go through and connect with the chip which will be hidden on the bottom. When I tried to give it a go with a drill in the general workshop, it cracked. The reason was probably because there was no water, therefore the marble got really hot until it broke. The second idea I had was to drill a tiny hole using the laser cutter again, but it would have probably taken ages and I wasn’t sure of it could have actually worked.. so my conclusion was to make a hole using a tiny drill from the jewellery department. Its diameter was 1 mm. After a first attempt on the broken marble piece, a success was achieved with the final piece too!

Successively I placed the copper charger into the circle I cut on the top side of the marble tile. It looks really good, apart from the fact that closer to where the tiny hole is, the wires are not aligned properly anymore, so I would need to replace this part again to make sure it looks flat all around.

Now the next thing I had to take into consideration was how to connect this charging dock to the power supply with a cable. The options here were two:
– to integrate this with the surface, which basically means to have a small hole in the table that would allow the cable to be hidden underneath. Best option to keep a minimal aesthetics.
– to laser cut a small channel on the bottom of the tile so that the cable would come out from one of the sides. This option would be good if you wish to easily move the charger to a different place in the room.

My decision on this was to opt for the option 1 because the charger is not supposed to be moved around the room and it’s obviously much better to keep cables hidden at all times, especially if there is no interaction needed with them (for example pressing an analogue button on them).

The last step in order to finalise the design of this component was to find a material I could have used to cover the bottom of the tile and to protect the microchip to fall down. All technicians suggested me to put some felt, however, I didn’t like that idea at all because marble has never been used with felt before, it just can’t sit to next to it. Marble is a premium material, therefore it needs to be accompanied by something that has a luxurious feel to it. I looked into some materials available at the art shop, but as I expected nothing satisfied my taste.

Finally, I ordered twenty samples of very high-quality calfskin black leather so that I can carefully make my decision on which one would work best for my marble tile.