iPad mounting bracket for laptop stand

A few years ago, I bought a ridiculous-yet-useful octopus-like “Viozon Selfie Desktop Live Stand Set” to organize my desk and improve my work-from-home set up.

One of the arms has a decent spring-loaded mobile device bracket, but it clamped on to my iPad in a way that gripped the Apple Pencil and prevented it from being accessible and also did not provide space for its case cover flap.

At first, I wondered if I could make use of the mounting magnets in the iPad (iPad Pro and iPad Air 4th and 5th gen). Fortunately, Apple publishes details for making mounts and cases for most of its devices: Accessory Design Guidelines for Apple Devices. There are some spiffy magnet orientations in the iPad to guarantee proper mounting bracket and case orientation, so I modelled a small 3x3 grid to hold some 1/8” neodymium magnets in the expected orientation.

Unfortunately, while the magnets are quite strong, they are only strong enough to hold the iPad without its case. The case is just thick enough to make the magnetic attraction too weak to support the device. So I needed a simpler bracket to set the iPad in, leaving the Pencil accessible on top and allow the case cover to rest behind the mount.

With my digital calipers in hand, I took some quick measurements of the mounting bracket and designed a quick J-shaped bracket in Shapr3D.

By coincidence, the elliptical shape of the rear support nearly matches the curve of my headphones and looks pretty slick!