December 2020: a CAD and 3D Print Project to Reclaim my Desk

I use some 3D printed laptop stands to reclaim desk space from my laptop-centric computing setup. The angle on those stands is fixed, but they're very sturdy. However, I was getting a bit annoyed reprinting customized stands to hold different laptops, I wanted to make a single model I could use to hold any laptop.

You can see the original, unadjustable stand and my gears turning on this reddit post as I was awaiting the delivery of my Lemur Pro.

So I made this: a laptop stand that can swing to different angles and different laptop thicknesses.

The undeployed laptop stand would hold a laptop vertically, if your hinge can do a 180, or you're happy with the screen being shut.

At about a 45 degree angle, a laptop on this stand takes up about half the desk-depth of one sitting flat, and the space underneath is somewhat useable too.

You can see my unadjustable stand holding up the laptop in the background.

This is an example of holding up a laptop. I'm holding the right side of the laptop up, though, because I only printed one.

Due to some unreliability when printing multiple parts at once, I used a brim. This variation actually includes two legs and two guide racks to be more stable.

In this picture, the one-sided stand actually needs to be propped up on a tool with some weight to it, while the two-sided one is stable. This is important for not having the stand fall over the moment you lift your laptop up off of it.

Challenges and Setbacks

Compared to the solid laptop stands, this adjustable one requires several bolts. I'm concerned these may loosen over time, which might even drop a laptop. Some ridges to make the rotating parts fit into each other more snuggly might clear that up.

Favorite Part

Fitting an entire stand onto one print job for a 200mm^2 print bed was a nice feature.

What I Learned

This project was a learning experience in FreeCAD. I can't say the swoopy guide rails were the greatest experience - I couldn't get them fully constrained in a stable way.

Any Future Potential?

This was a cool stand, but needed more iteration. The ridges I mentioned would be nice, because who needs any arbitrary angle? If the stand only tightened into some angles every 5 to 10 degrees, it'd still be adjustable enough.

The bolts I needed were actually longer than any I had in stock, so a design that allows bolts from both sides (less than half the length!) would help keep the parts common.

This article is a backblog, in which I use a template generation script to turn folders of images into a quick and dirty showcase of something I spent my time on.

I'm backblogging to reflect on 2021, which had a lot of projects I never documented. To facilitate this, I went through my phone's photos and copied them to folders for each individual project, and wrote a script to spit out a template, resize and rename the images, and give me some standard paragraph headers for what to write about. Ironically, this initial backblog article is from a design in late 2020.