15 September 2022

TABLET WALL MOUNTS FROM A UK DESIGNER

Tablet Wall Mounts Designed and Produced in the UK

There is a distinct lack of decent tablet wall mounts in the UK!

If you are into home automation using something like Home Assistant, Hubitat, Actiontiles (SmartThings) or even Google Home or Amazon Alexa, having a wall-mounted dashboard gives visibility to your devices, allowing a centralised point of control. Finding an aesthetically pleasing way to mount those dashboards is vital if your endeavours are to remain acceptable by others!

I started designing wall mounts after picking up a couple of Fire HD8's and an HD10 on Black Friday deals, specifically for adding a few Home Assistant dashboards around the house. Initially, this was out of pure necessity. The only mounts I could find (that looked half decent) were produced in the USA and with the aim of producing the thinnest possible frame, used custom charging methods and cables (which I didn't want). There were horror stories of tablets falling out of them and having them shipped out to the UK ended up in a mount that cost more than the discounted tablets!

Having looked these options, I decided to break out Fusion 360 and create a design addressing the following key points:

- No visible cables

- Use a readily available 90 degree USB cable that could be plugged into a standard charger

- Easily mounted

- Easy to access the tablet

- Access to the power button while the tablet is on the wall

- No risk of the tablet falling out

- Can be mounted in portrait or landscape orientation

- Visually acceptable to the 'domestic authority'!

After many design iterations and a lot of swearing, I came up with something that fulfils all of those requirements.

The design comprises of 3 main components and a power switch extension:

- Wall Spacer
  This allows the USB cable to enter a wall box or other opening and gives the tablet the appearance of 'floating' 5mm off the wall.

- Rear Tablet Frame
  Mounts on top of the wall spacer, holds the tablet routes the USB cable.

- Front Tablet Frame
  Clips over the tablet rear frame.

The mounts were originally designed to be attached directly to a standard UK light switch back box but I also added holes for USA back boxes and additional screw mounting points holes. The Wall Spacer and rear frame can also be glued together and the whole rear assembly attached to the wall using Command Strips or double sided foam tape.

Having posted photos of my wall mounts on a few of the Facebook home automation groups, it quickly became evident there was quite a demand a for these to be made available to purchase and I've received a number of requests to produce versions for other tablets.