Customizable Smartphone stand / charging holder by DrLex

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This is a customizable stand for smartphones, small tablets, calculators, or other thin devices.
If you want, you can configure it to have holes and gaps for routing a USB cable, so you can use the stand while charging your device, assuming it has its USB port exactly in the middle of the bottom (which seems to be quite standard these days).
There is also an option to make it wall-mountable, although this will only really be feasible for smaller devices.
To create your own model, hit the Customizer button, or if the online Customizer is broken, look at my instructions for running Customizer on your own computer. (Download both the .scad and .json file to get presets for the example models.)
You will need to set the ‘lift’ value high enough to have sufficient room inside the holder to route a cable through the optional front or rear hole. This depends on the type of cable. I recommend the flat kind of USB cable as can be seen in the photos: it is very flexible, the plugs are also quite small and fit through the holes easily. (Routing thicker cables with larger plugs through the rear hole may still be possible by first inserting the plug from above, and then inserting it again from below and then straightening the cable.)
If your charging cable will be coming from the front, enable the ‘frontGap’ option to make it much easier to insert and remove the phone (shown in the second photo). This option will include a support into the print that needs to be removed afterwards. If your printer's bridging and cooling parameters are set up correctly, this support should be easy to remove (in my ABS print, it almost popped out spontaneously when it cooled down). If not, a knife should help.
You may enable the ‘preview’ checkbox to view the model in an upright pose while configuring it. However, do not print it in this orientation on a regular FDM printer! It would require supports that can be easily avoided in the sideways position (and it would also look worse, and be weaker).
Before printing the entire model, you should verify whether your phone will really fit without having too much margin. To do this, enable the ‘testPiece’ option and set the width to 5. This will produce a quick-to-print slice of the stand, which you can use to check if you don't need to increase or decrease the ‘thick’ value, or increase the ‘lift’ value to offer more room for a cable.