While working with Keystone and ENES100, I needed to make a few instructional videos about 3D printing, and to do this, I mostly used my phone. For quite some time, I'd been wanting to make a 3D printable adapter to work with a standard tripod, but I never had the motivation until I was asked to design one that could be used to record student interviews.

"What makes this any different from any other phone stand posted online," you ask? Good question. That was the same question that came up when 3Dprint.com wrote this article about it. There are a bunch of tripod mounts available if you search for them. Many of them are very cool, and well designed, like thing 1165406, which even includes a very clever, and terrific looking print-in-place tripod (Sneaky NinjaFlex o-ring too). One of the issues that came up with these designs was that they almost all needed some additional hardware. Threaded fasteners, or nails, or rubber bands, and in this case, a 3.5mm headphone plug. For use in this course, we couldn't be sure that we'd have the correct hardware laying around when one of these gets printed, so a big focus was making the whole thing 3D-printable. In fact, I have also more recently uploaded a print-in-place tripod, in case we don't have one of those sitting around either. A couple other things I wanted to add are the flexible jaws, which ensure that no phones are scratched, and also allow me to use the vernier-inspired tensioning mechanism. I've always liked the way vernier calipers allow for more accurate measurements than are typically possible on a purely visual scale, and the hole/peg setup I used here works on a similar principle, because it's easy to adjust, but mostly because I nerded out and thought it would be cool. Basically, when you squeeze the jaws around your phone, only one set of holes will line up. Push the pin in that hole, and it will hold your phone securely. Here's the Thingiverse link for the phone holder, here is the link for the print-in-place tripod (coming soon, sorry!), and some more pictures: