More Photos of iPad Stand Construction

After the success of my original iPad stand I decided to use the left-over length of oak board to make four more stands. I slightly modified the design this time to include an angled front face on the base. I am calling this design “iPad stand No. 3″, as it is the third modification to my basic stand design (there was an original prototype with a shorter upright, as well as the design described in my earlier post). I decided to photograph the construction of these stands and write another post as I felt my previous post was lacking in photos and might have been hard to follow. So here again is a description of how to make my stand for the iPad 2.

Note: measurements below for the iPad 2 only.

As before I started with a board that was 110mm wide by 22mm thick after squaring and milling (the same board in fact). From this I cut four base blocks, this time 110mm long to match the width of the board (the length should exactly match the width of the board). Making them 110mm long meant I could use the full width of the board for the upright parts.

The four 110x110mm base blocks.

The next job was to cut a slot 14mm wide by 5mm deep in each block. The slot is cut 20mm in from the front edge of the base as indicated in the diagram below.

This is my simple home made router table. An acrylic plate screws onto the base of the router and sits in a recess in the table.

The slot is cut in one of the bases. I made the slot in two passes as my biggest router bit was 12mm diameter.

After cutting the slot, mark a line along the bottom of the slot, 9.5mm (can be a small as 9.1mm) in from the front edge of the slot.

I found a stick that was 9mm wide and used that to measure out the cutting line in the slot.

Next, mark a cutting line for the front face of the base. This should be located 8mm from the slot front as shown in the diagram below. Ultimately you’ll make four angled cuts in the base as indicated by the blue dashed lines.

Set your saw blade angle to 14°. The rest of the cuts will be made at this angle. Start by cutting the angled front face of the base. Keep the off-cut as you’ll need it for the glue-up.

The front face cuts have been made.

Next make the cut in the slot to create the front piece of the base.

Lining up the saw for the slot cut.

The photo above shows a narrow piece I used for testing the cuts. Here the slot cut has been made and you can see that small bit of the slot remains on the back bit of the base. The next task is to trim that face to remove the residual slot.

Now mark another cutting line on the top face of the bask part of the base, 60mm from the sloping face as shown in the cutting diagram above. Cut along this line to create the rear sloping face (at the opposite slope to the front face). Keep the off-cut.

The parts of your base block should now look like this.

Next, I took a length of my 110x22mm board and cut it through the middle of the 22mm side on a table saw to create two thinner 110mm wide boards for the upright parts. These I milled to about 7.5mm thick. These were then cut into 160mm lengths with the saw blade still at the 14° angle (same slope direction at both ends).

Cutting a 160mm upright piece from the thin board.

Before gluing the parts together, sand the upright board to 180 grit, and also sand the slot in the base, and the top face of the rear part of the base. These surfaces are difficult to sand properly once glued.

The final construction job is to glue the upright board to the base parts. To do this, make a sandwich of the base parts, including the off-cuts (front and back, don’t glue these of course, just glue the faces that butt against the upright) and the upright and clamp it tight between two lengths of timber as shown in the photo below. For glue I use cross-linking PVA.

When set, remove the clamps and discard the off-cuts. The stand is ready for final sanding and finishing.

Spindicator Mk 2–Now With Fade Effect.

I’ve had a couple of questions asking about using capacitors to fade out the  LEDs of the spindicator to give a sort of trail effect, and I thought I’d like to try it myself. So let’s get straight to the circuit.

The first thing to note is that in this version I have used the computers 12V supply, not the 5V supply as in the original spindicator. This is necessary to obtain a good fade effect from the capacitor.

The motherboard interface and low pass filter are the same as in the original circuit. The difference is that the counter’s outputs now switch  general purpose NPN transistors (a BC 547 in this case). When a transistor switches on, its associated LED is lit via the 1k Ohm resistor, and the 47uF electrolytic capacitor charges. When the transistor switches off, the capacitor discharges via the 1k Ohm resistor and LED, fading the LED as the charge dissipates. The fade time is a function of the values of the resistor and capacitor; the larger the values the slower the fade. The resistor is also the current limiting resistor for the LED, so that sets a limit to its value (between 470-1000 Ohms for most LEDs). What I found with breadboard testing is that if the fade time is too long, the whole spindicator ring lights when there is lots of disk activity, and you lose the spinning effect. I found that a 47uF capacitor gave a noticeable but suitably quick fade to each LED.

A challenge I faced with this circuit is that it has many more components than the original spindicator, with an extra 10 capacitors, 10 transistors and 20 resistors. The prototype board and patch wires approach would be too big and messy, so I decided to make my own PCB. With some trial and error I managed to get a reasonable result by laser printing (Brother HL-2170W) a design onto some Canon glossy photo paper (GP-401) and using an iron on its hottest setting to transfer the toner to a blank copper circuit board. It required some hard pressing to stick the print to the board, and then more working over the areas where the traces were with the tip of the iron. What I found though is that the paper then pulled away cleanly, leaving the traces stuck to the board. There was no mucking around soaking off the paper in water as others have reported when using this technique. If some of the traces pull off with the paper, you can just clean the board with some xylene based brush cleaner and try again with a fresh printout.

The above photo shows my copper board with its toner transfer sitting in the ammonium persulphate etching solution. You’ll notice some rough edges on the left hand ground trace, but there was enough cover left so I didn’t bother to print it again.

The end result, with components all soldered in is shown in the photo at the beginning of this post. I’ve connected all the LED cathodes together (not shown) so that there is only one common cathode wire and 10 anode wires running to the LEDs. I have not yet installed this spindicator – I’m waiting for the next time I’m doing some work inside the server (probably when I upgrade to WHS 2011).

Here’s a quick video of the spindicator mk.2 working at a constant clock frequency of about 25 Hz. The background sound in the video is rain on my workshop roof.

Make Your Own iPad Stand

Percy admires the stand

UPDATE: I have added a new post with more construction photos and a slightly modified stand design here.

Here’s a simple woodworking project that I thought might be of interest to iPad owners . When I recently purchased my iPad 2 I decided to forego a “smart cover” in favour of a  leather sleeve from Saddleback Leather. To complement the sleeve I decided to whip up a wooden stand.  The design I came up with is easy to make with only three glued-together parts, as I describe below.

I made mine from white oak. Start by milling a two lengths of board, one to about 22mm thick (could be a bit thinner depending on what you have), the other to 7mm thick. I milled 300mm lengths of each as that’s about the minimum I can put through the thicknesser. The base part is made from the thicker board, and the upright from the 7mm board. The thicker board should be at least 110mm wide, and the thinner board should be cut to exactly 100mm wide.

Ultimately you want to end up with the three pieces, which have the following profile when the stand is viewed from the side. Note that the base pieces are being viewed end-grain on, so really their length is 100mm, not their width, but you know what I mean.

N.B. These measurements are for an iPad 2, NOT a first generation iPad. The width of the slot (9.5mm above) should be increased to 14mm for the original iPad.

These parts will be glued together to make the stand as shown below.

For the base parts, straight cut a 100mm length of the thick board. It should be exactly the same length as the width of the thin board. What I did was finish the thin board to 100mm wide first, then used that as a template to set the cut distance for the thick board. Now you should have a base block which is 100mm long, at least 110mm wide and 18-22mm thick.

The next job is to rout the 5mm deep slot in the base. I suggest doing this before you make the angled cut which divides the base into two pieces. Using a table router is easiest. Cut the slot along the grain of the block, 10mm in from the front edge. Cut the slot about 14mm wide (18mm for iPad 1). This allows room to get the saw blade in for the angled cut. Mark a cutting line on the base of the slot 9.5mm (iPad 2) or 14mm (iPad 1) in from the front of the slot. Set the blade angle of your compound mitre saw to 14° and cut along the cutting line to make the front piece off the base. Make sure you’re cutting the angle the right way. The corresponding angled edge on the back part of the base will have some left-over slot cut in it, so trim it off using the angled saw. Now flick the back part around and cut the rear face at the same angle so that the long edge is about 70mm as shown in the drawing above. Keep the off-cut, as you’ll need it for the glue-up.

Lastly, with the saw still set at 14°, cut the thin upright board to length (165mm). Pre-sand the parts prior to gluing.

To glue the parts I sandwiched them between two lengths of wood as shown in the picture below. This is where you need to put the off-cut from the back of the base into the sandwich (don’t glue it of course) in order to make a vertical surface at the back.

Finish the stand as you please. I went for a dark warm-brown finish using a reddish dye followed by a mix of red-brown stain and a dark brown stain sealed with amber shellac and finished with satin polyurethane.