2016-04-11 - restroom tablet mount project

nature on invention is based on one assumption – things can be improved. and most of the time they can, indeed. :) here's a little story of internet access in my restroom(s) over a time.

back when i was a student, wifi devices were rare and usually expensive… so i just pulled the ethernet cable to the restroom and old laptop did the trick. well… almost – it was not too convenient and by the time it booted… you were most likely “done”. ;)

wifis took over quite fast. then smart phones kicked in. now you have wifi-connected phone and you're good. unless you want a bit bigger screen for more convenient reading…

so you buy a tablet. nice, readable screen which means… big device, inconvenient to hold in your hand.

fortunately now 3d printers are more and more common place. so what can we do? :)

first approach was a trivial idea – just print 3 hooks, and glue them to the doors, in the right place. it looked like this:

ok - now we're getting somewhere! :)

while it was just enough for reading, it turned out to be a bad thing during parties. after all they were ~5cm long hooks waiting for ppl to accidentally rip them off, while trying to get in/out of the room. after gluing these twice, i decided to improve.

so what was now needed was a sort of hook, that could be hidden, when not used. and so i used joints and mechanical latch to keep it closed.

from that point on there were no critical problems, yet mechanical latch was a bit inconvenient, especially when operated with one hand.

fortunately there was a solution to this as well! :) neodymium magnet turned out to be a perfect fit here. after removing a mechanical latch, i've just glued two, small, neodymium magnets to both parts (i.e. a wall mount and a flip).

now everything is opening and closing with one hand, whenever needed, while at the same time it is small, thus does not cause injuries while moving around. :)

the whole project is obviously open-source. you can download OpenSCAD sources of restroom toilet mount project from github. as of writing these words, version 3.0 is there, as described. happy surfing! :)