BUILD: Planar Tripod

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For my last post I included a demo of the CNC Typewriter in action. In order to film this, I realized I needed a second pair of hands around. Rather than ask a roommate to hold the camera, I figured I’d have a little fun designing a piece—and so this tripod was born.

The entire project is cut out of a single sheet of 3mm acrylic. Though it doesn’t have all of the usual degrees of freedom included in camera tripods, it solidly gets the job done for static shots. All in all it was about three hours of CAD, mostly done on an airplane. The whole build was conceived, drawn out, cut, and assembled in the span of a few days. The only screws I have on-hand max out at 25mm, so I had to get a bit creative with the fastening in some areas, but the final product is quite robust.

Designed to hold an iPhone 5 but could be adapted to a different model by resizing of two of the components.

I’m sure it’ll have much use in the future.

Thanks for reading!

Edit 2018/09/28: Added DWG files, hosted here on Dropbox.