3D printing my laptop ergonomic setup

Summary

Apparently, one of my hobbies is making updates to my ergonomic setup, then blogging about it from an Amtrak train. I've gone and done it again. My setup stayed static for some time, but my most recent iteration ended up letting me down and I had to change it again. It gave me a lot of useful information and strongly shaped how I approached this iteration. This new one is closest to the first one I wrote about in 2024, but with some major improvements and reproducibility. Why make more changes? First things first, though. Why am making I yet more changes to this setup? Besides my constant neurodivergent drive to make things perfect, my setups all kept causing me some problems. In chronological order, here are the problems and neat benefits of each setup I used for at least a few months. My first one was difficult to adjust the keyboard width. You had to flip it over and loosen hardware from the bottom. It was also a little heavy. There's a limit to how far I can reduce weight when using a Keyboardio Model 100, but we can get closer. However, this rig was very fast to set up. It also did keep my keyboard at a good width. My second one used hinges made from fabric and hook-and-loop fasteners, which was neat but ultimately it fell apart, it was tedious to adjust, and it took a long time to set up. The big benefit of this setup was that it was extremely light. This was helpful when I was suffering from a lot of fatigue and POTS. My third one had a neat hinging mechanism which was useful for smaller spaces but wasn't much faster to set up. It used a smaller lighter keyboard, but ultimately that keyboard ended up relapsing my nerve pain. My fourth one, not previously written about, was... way too heavy. It was also a little tedious to setup, but the weight was its biggest problem. I made that one from off-the-shelf parts (mostly), with the goal of making something reproducible for others. And it worked with any laptop, not just ones with a 180 degree hinge like mine. But,...