rapman-education's posterous

rapman-education's posterous

Dave White  //  A place for educators, teachers, lecturers and students to find "stuff" about RapMan,BfB3000 and BfB 3DTouch printers... The unofficial Blog by Dave White, Advanced Skills Teacher and Head of D&T in Clevedon School UK.

Jul 30 / 10:55am

iPad tripod... Revisited

(download)

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with my iPad. I want to plug things in and control things but I just won't let me do it... But some of the camera apps are superb, however many like the slow motion or time lapse really need a steady/fixed iPad. Hence my desire to fix my iPad onto a camera tripod.

As you might realise I have tinkered around with this before and produced some trial designs, but none of them were very professional or even finished. So here is my latest iteration and it's pretty close to being successful.

My previous designs were trying to be as universal as possible in its fixing to the tripod by using the standard camera fixing screw. The iPad is however pretty big and heavy and using just this single fixing didn't fill me with confidence so I made the decision to use the quick release mount on the pan and tilt head of the tripod.

Of course the "wedges" under the top plate create a huge overhang but this was simply overcome by printing the plate and wedge parts as separate items to be slotted together. Although I have a triple head printer I didn't want to start printing with support material, in that way the design could be easily made on a single head machine.

So I now have a secure mount for my iPad perhaps now I can play a bit more with some of the camera apps and have the peace of mind that it's not going to fall off the tripod. And maybe I'll love my iPad a bit more!

 

Update... Just added a video of the tripod mount to YouTube .... Photos taken with iPad, video created with iMovie, music composed and performed with GarageBand... Perhaps I do like my iPad quite a lot really:)

Component parts can be downloaded from thingiverse iPad tripod mount by davewhite60 - Thingiverse