Turing Tumble Community

Challenge #4: Tilt-adjustable stand

One of our stretch goals was to make a tilt-adjustable stand for the board. It would be pretty cool - you could adjust the speed of the computer by changing the tilt of the board.

Now I thought this would be easy. Just a few more notches in the stand and we’re good to go, right? It turned out to be far more complicated. First of all, the stand gets narrow near the back and wide toward the front. This causes two problems: (1) If the board stands in notches near the back (a steeper angle), the support is too narrow and the board tips to the sides easily. (2) If the board stands in notches too far forward (to give it a shallower angle), the two notches quickly get too far apart to hold the board.

The other tricky issue is that the supports need to touch the back side of the board without getting in the way of any parts sticking through it. And on top of all that, it needs to support the board well enough that it doesn’t wobble all over when you put parts on it.

Feel free to modify the board instead of the stands if you like. The simpler and sturdier, the better.

Excited to see your designs!

I thought that maybe adding screw-feet to the stand could help in two ways:

  • You could adjust the inclination front to back to change the computer speed
  • You could adjust the inclination left and right to cope with not horizontal tables/floor.

The first time I ran the computer, I had weird behaviours due to my table being slightly tilted to the right. That resulted in the blue balls gathering too much speed and sometimes jumping off the first ramp and messing around.

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I remixed this adjustable tablet stand from Thingiverse: Adjustable tablet stand by FruityPebbles - Thingiverse

I printed at 175% the original size and modified the below part with some carefully placed obloids to clear everything on the back of the board:

image

The result works fine, but doesn’t have enough adjustability in the direction of making the board angle less steep. I would remix the base part to account for this if I was printing again.

@paul–Could you just stick a couple of shims under the present stand to make the board angle more shallow?