After drafting up the plans in 2D, Fusion360 makes it really easy to extrude them into 3D parts so you can get a fell for what the finished product will look like. Here’s where the parametric modeling really shines — you can look at what you’ve designed, decide what you’d like to change about it, mess with just a few dimensions (the rest update automatically) and you can look at the new design, all very quickly, and without having to start over.

This phone stand is pretty simple, the only part that took some real thinking to design was the little arm at the top right where normally you’d hang a watch. My girlfriend wears a fitbit and so I wanted not only a place to hang the fitbit, but to also integrate the charger as well. However, the fitbit charger is a very strange shape, it’s got these two wings that jut out and clamp over the watch, sort of like a clothes pin, and in the center is a prong where the actual charging connection is made. After some head scratching, I came up with a shape that would allow the whole charger to be inserted snugly into the stand, and allow you to clip it and fitbit such that it hangs like a regular watch would. Or so I hoped. And this time, it actually worked!

I also wanted to throw some V-Carve engraving on this, cuz why not? So a drew up a terrible drawing of a squid / octopus with a top hat (an inside joke), took a photo of it, vectorized it, and v-carved it into the phone stand. I think this was really the only thing I’d like to have done better on this project, I should have smoothed out the vector before carving it. Instead, the vector was pretty noisy and that noise was dutifully reproduced by my CNC router.

So here’s the final product, it’s got a phone holder / charger, fitbit holder (you can see how the charger pushes into the little hole for it), room for two pens, glasses, and a tray in the back for keys or other detritus of modern living one needs to store at the end of the day.