Charged Up by Bob Ford

I live in a house that is old enough that some of the original electrical outlets require a three-prong adapter, since the originals were installed before it became standard practice to include the ground prong on outlets. Some rooms only have a couple outlets as well.

"Why do you have to hog all the outlets!" is something my wife will frequently yell at me. Of course, she is referring to the fact that I have GPS collars plugged in all the time. If you have more than a couple dogs, and most of us hound owners do, then you know the hassle of charging 4# collars at the end of a hunt. When I hunt in Maine, and there are 5 guys who each brought 3-6 beagles. We run a morning pack and an afternoon pack. charging collars gets complicated, and if you walk into the camp as the last guy to arrive, well, good luck. I decided that there had to be a way to do this with one plug.

I bought a cheap tackle box. I removed the three plastic containers provided for organizing lures. That opens up room for the collars to be set to charge. The top shelf of the tackle box was perfect for placing a bank of USB ports. The GPS collars' charging cords are USB cords that attach to a plug that fits into a wall outlet. I drilled holes from the top compartment into the area underneath, where the collars will be charging. I drilled a hole for each charging cord.

A hole was drilled in the back of the tackle box so that the USB hub's power cord could be placed through it and plugged into the wall. The tackle box could then be closed without pinching any wires. Next, I affixed the USB hub to the top shelf with zip ties by threading the zip ties through small holes on either side of the USB hub and tightening them.

One plug is all I need in my house, at camp, or even in the field with my portable power, which you can see in a video that shows the portable collar charging system that I built.