I recently decided to tried my hand at building a physical thing. A stand for my iPhone. I decided I wanted to go through the whole process and see what its like. So I started with a mockup:

It’s a simple thing, a piece of wood with a slanted channel to put your phone in. Here’s how it turned out:

It looks ok, but there’s a couple of things I didn’t like with this first version. It held the phone just fine but it didn't look right or inspire enough confidence to actually trust it with my phone.

Time for a second version. There were three things I wanted to change. The width of the base, its angle and I wanted to add little anti-slip pads.

The width was straight forward, I measured my phone and added a centimetre. This way my phone would get to sit in the middle of the base.

For the angle, I wanted my phone to “face” me. The whole point of the base was to keep me from moving my neck too much to see my phone. This angle also defined the out cuts on the base because I wanted all the angles to match. After a bunch of test, I settled with 15º, which is rather comfortable.

Finally, I wanted to add anti-slipping pads to the base. I originally wanted to get some clear vinyl pads. I ended up settling for 1/2” cork pads though. The cork pads looked nicer and were thinner than their vinyl counterparts.

With everything figured out, I moved onto the mock up. I learned a couple of new techniques for sketchup so making it was a lot faster. Here’s what the mockup ended up looking like:

And here’s what it ended up looking like at then end:

All in all, I am pretty happy with the results. The base matches my original idea and fulfils my expectations. It’s not perfect, my wood working skills leave much to be desired. I made a couple of mistakes which I plan on correcting on my next build. Here’s the sketchup model in case you want to play with it or build your own: Download SketchUp Model

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