I Built A Desk Phone Holder Out Of LEGO
What was that saying about necessity being the mother of invention? Yup. True. Every word of it. We needed to get to places faster, we built airplanes. We needed information to travel faster than the airplanes, we built the internet. We needed hot food quicker, we built the microwave, and so on. Humans throughout history built things as they needed or anticipated needing them — classic case being the iPhone, the automobile or the train. I am a human, and I saw a need, so put two and two together — I obviously built something.
And it wasn’t even a selfish need. My friend Natalia Für spends an incredible amount of time on the phone, sitting on video-calls. That’s an exhausting task in itself, but when you have to come up with creative ways to keep that phone straight for three hours, while plugged into headphones, at a decent viewing-angle, it just becomes a tedious, frustrating, recurring mini-nightmare.
At first I suggested this yoke that I got many moons ago with my Oral-B Bluetooth enabled electric toothbrush, but as she put it “it won’t work cause the headphone’s willy is gonna stick out”. 😂 Fair point. There was no hole for the “willy”, and I wasn’t about to drill one; it wouldn't have been deep enough anyway to accommodate the length of the “willy” — aka, the headphone plug — just in case you were thinking of something else this whole time! Jaaayzus, get yer mind out of the gutter. 🤣 Anyhow, this definitely wasn’t gonna do the job, so away I went disappointed — genuinely — that my attempt to help did not come to fruition. As an aside, did you notice how often when we want to help, and people either find our help unhelpful or unnecessary, we nearly feel gutted? Yeah? No? Or maybe it’s just me. Because of my mother. As a therapist friend of mine said once, “it’s always your mother”.
Circling back to the original problem, I still felt the issue was unsolved, therefore it was still up to me to find a solution, and of course, LEGO was the answer. Half the time is. It got me through my childhood and early teenage years, some of my adulthood, clearly it can solve such a mundane problem as holding a bloody phone! So, I got to work.
I decided to use Technic parts, because they felt more suitable for the task. The interlocking mechanisms are a lot more reliable and certain angles are easier to achieve. I also just so happened to have a big bag of them handy. The main goals to achieve were:
- doesn’t have a huge footprint
- intuitive to use
- resembles commercially available ones out there
- doesn’t fall apart
- isn’t ugly
After about half an hour of rummaging through the bag, I came up with an MVP, but it had two major defects:
- the “willy” didn’t fit, it was too wide for the hole I made
- any phone thicker than an iPhone SE with a transparent case and screen protector, would not fit, and even that would be uncomfortably snuggly, eventually rubbing against the screen protector all the time.
So, it was time for improvements. A bit more hunting through the bag and another fifteen minutes later I had something that I and Natalia were both happy with.
On its own:
With an iPhone XS docked on to it:
From the side view with phone docked:
All things considered, I am pretty happy. In the space of less than an hour I created a solution to a genuine problem with a bit of imagination, and a few LEGO parts. It’s a perfectly practical desktop phone holder. It’s also:
- waterproof, so can be used in the bathroom, should there be a need
- stable enough to interact with the phone while docked
- protects the headphone plug from aggressive bending
- can accommodate a large number of mobile devices of various weights, so fairly future-proof
The best part? My friend now sees LEGO from a completely different angle. Her words, not mine: “You completely changed my perspective on what LEGO is for. I always thought it as something you just build little cars and boats and stuff from.”
So, there you go, problem solved, perspectives changed. Now go forth and solve some stuff yourself. I can’t be doing all the problem-solving here... 😉
While I have you here…
Just in case you’d like to read some more of my thoughts on technology or software development, here’s a few you might find useful or intriguing:
Did you know that whenever you subscribe to become a Medium Member, us writers, get a cut? You get a ton of great articles, we get a coffee. Sounds like a fair deal to me…
Attila Vago — Software engineer, editor, writer, and occasional music critic. Pragmatic doer, Lego fan, Mac user, cool nerd. JS and Flutter enthusiast. Accessibility advocate.
