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Comment by daemoens | Hacker News Reader

Could you rescale the model to fit an iPhone 13 Mini?

Rescaling usually doesn't work well because the MagSafe portion is static between all sizes. Hence, every custom sizing needs a custom re-design.

In theory, with parametric design (eg OpenSCAD, Autodesk Inventor, etc) a model could allow you to enter the phone dimensions and it automatically re-calculates the correct geometry.

In practice, experience says doing this (in a robust way) is a lot harder than it sounds. ;)

Thanks, very nice design and write-up.

It's not really that much harder, as long as you know which dimensions you want to be variable from the start. Going back and changing everything after the fact is a massive pain.

I’ve started to put something together in OpenSCAD: https://u.ale.sh/braunscadv1.png

I’ll share the source once it’s a bit less painful to look at (right now everything is a bunch of copy-pasted spaghetti code :')

I am extremely interested in this. I’ve got a new iPhone 16 and I’d love to use it in its case with this stand.

I wonder if there's a version that's more of a shelf so could accommodate (m)any sized phones and with/without cases?

I think it's doable with a parametric design in Fusion but it is definitely more work up-front or re-work after you have a working version. Getting a well parameterized and set of constrained sketches can be a time consuming process since I don't do it every day. It's probably the part I've struggled with the most in making 3D printable designs (I'm not OP but design cosplay props for my kids) since I don't always know what I want the final dimensions to be.

And a parametric design requires you to buy the commercial Fusion license.

No it doesn't, unless you mean some more advanced parametric features that just the basic parameter driven modelling.

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