Lightning Adapters in the Elevation Dock

Remember my last post where I was talking about 3D printing? After writing it, I contacted my friend Michael Buffington, who recently won a Makerbot at the XOXO conference.

I showed him a few basic lightning adapter designs on Thingaverse, which he printed, but then we realized in testing them out they all had drawbacks. The fit wasn't perfect in any of them, one was great at holding a cord but you could push the cord out of the device when connecting it on a table top. None of them dealt with the bend of a new Apple lightning cable very well.

Buffington tweaked some things and made a new second part that holds the cable down while also forcing the hard bend. Photos of the dock with the parts mounted are here in a Flickr slideshow:

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=122138
and here is video of the dock being used on my desk:

[vimeo 52113958 w=500 h=281]

It's just two pieces of printed plastic and a couple off-the-shelf nuts and bolts going into existing holes to put it all together. Buffington's design is now on Thingaverse, my hope is anyone else with a Elevation dock can upgrade it to allow for iPhone 5 charging.

As always, 3D printing your own parts in real-time is totally awesome and I can't wait until everyone has a desktop 3D printer at home.