What you can see here is a plain wall mount for an very old iPod Touch. The design itself is nothing special, contains some errors actually and was one of the first designs I created.

Even though it's simple and not done that well, it became one of my most used 3d printed items.

Why did I upload it?

Well, even though it's not one of the best designs, it still looks quite smooth and definitely good enough for daily use.

The actual reason why I uploaded this file is because of the idea behind it.

My problem with smart homes today is that you mostly have to use your phone: You need to pick it up, start the app, go through several menus and all of that only to change the brightness of a lightbulb or something.

Having a cleaned up interface just above the normal light switches made my "smart home life" a lot easier. As soon as I walk into the room, I can turn on my TV or PC. I can turn off the lights in the corridor, if I forgot to turn them off and also turn off the TV without walking back to the remote.

Even though these examples sound like first world problems, believe me, it is a great benefit for smart homes. And considering the fact, that many of us have some old smartphones laying around, it's quite cheap as well.

So after all I uploaded this to give you an idea on how to make "smart homes" really accesible. A smart phone as a remote is annyoing and takes a lot of time and assistants like Alexa aren't good enough (yet, at least not for my purposes).

How does it work?

openHAB (https://www.openhab.org/) is a great open-source software that lets you do everything you want with your smart home devices. It is properly the software that supports most of the smart home devices out there and it runs on a RPi!.

But to be honest, it's not the easiest software to use, especially if you want to do weird things, BUT you can do really EVERYTHING.

To have a nice and clean interface, I put together some HTML, CSS and JS, hardcoded the openHAB items to the buttons you can see in the describing picture and hosted all that stuff on my NAS.

This is definitely not the best solution though and the code almost smells bad, but it works consistently. If you plan on recreating this, you should have a look at openHABs different user interfaces.

How to print and use

I printed it standing, just like in the model. I noticed that the hole at the bottom isn't open in slicing software, but it should be. Not sure if it's just a display error or if it's also printing like that. If your slicing software closes the hole for the charger, maybe just move the model lower, under the "bed" in the slicer software until the hole is open again.

As I said, one of my first designs.

I recommend to use some felt over the screws. Not because of scratching (the heads of the screws should remain in the sinks) but to make the iPod sit tight in the mount.

Category: Electronics