Phone Stand Valet Thingy
These things are all over etsy. I can do this right?
Quick update: if you want the plans for this project, they can be found here
Setting aside my terrible CNC enclosure project, I wanted to get started on my first “real” CNC project. I thought making a little phone stand for my girlfriend would be actually achievable, and useful, and fun!
And this time, for once, I was right!
I used Fusion360 to draw up some plans for the phone stand.
This was pretty fun because I got to practice parametric modeling, which is a methodology / technology for designing things in CAD. Essentially, instead of giving every single part in your plan a fixed dimension (this edge is 3 inches, that one is 4 inches, etc), you express all the dimensions relative to others, by adding constraints. For example, you say “this line is the same length as that line, and perpendicular to this other line” and so on. What’s really cool about designing things this way is if you do it right, you can come back to your plans and change your mind. For example, you can decide to make the phone stand a few inches wider. You change one setting (the overall width) and then all the other little parts adapt appropriately — some parts get proportionally bigger, and some parts just move over without changing size. Sort of like how webpages react to you changing the size of your browser window. Anyway, as a software engineer, this way of thinking is pretty natural and fun for me, so it’s been neat to apply it to design as well.
After drafting up the plans in 2D, Fusion360 makes it really easy to extrude them into 3D parts so you can get a fell for what the finished product will look like. Here’s where the parametric modeling really shines — you can look at what you’ve designed, decide what you’d like to change about it, mess with just a few dimensions (the rest update automatically) and you can look at the new design, all very quickly, and without having to start over.
This phone stand is pretty simple, the only part that took some real thinking to design was the little arm at the top right where normally you’d hang a watch. My girlfriend wears a fitbit and so I wanted not only a place to hang the fitbit, but to also integrate the charger as well. However, the fitbit charger is a very strange shape, it’s got these two wings that jut out and clamp over the watch, sort of like a clothes pin, and in the center is a prong where the actual charging connection is made. After some head scratching, I came up with a shape that would allow the whole charger to be inserted snugly into the stand, and allow you to clip it and fitbit such that it hangs like a regular watch would. Or so I hoped. And this time, it actually worked!
I also wanted to throw some V-Carve engraving on this, cuz why not? So a drew up a terrible drawing of a squid / octopus with a top hat (an inside joke), took a photo of it, vectorized it, and v-carved it into the phone stand. I think this was really the only thing I’d like to have done better on this project, I should have smoothed out the vector before carving it. Instead, the vector was pretty noisy and that noise was dutifully reproduced by my CNC router.
So here’s the final product, it’s got a phone holder / charger, fitbit holder (you can see how the charger pushes into the little hole for it), room for two pens, glasses, and a tray in the back for keys or other detritus of modern living one needs to store at the end of the day.
