Room setup - Primary desk
Room setup - Primary desk
Welcome back to the next part of the room setup project. In this post I present the primary desk on which I implemented some special features.
Overview
In my room setup, I wanted to have a primary desk, dedicated for work on my computer and also gaming. I have set some requirements for it prior to the start of this project, which was to have the ability to rise or lower the desk to work on my computer while standing or sitting.
Lift mechanism
The idea for this came pretty early, after viewing some automated height adjustable desks, of which the prices range from 2000 - 3000 CHF, to build one myself.
So I bought an IKEA desk for roughly 200 CHF (on which the height can be adjusted with a hand crank) and wanted to build an electromotor into it. I had a small electric motor lying around since a while, and wanted to try doing it with this.
On the firsy try, I printed two gears, to translate the fast movement of the motor to more power at the cost of speed. This solution worked, but in my opinion it was way to slow and I had difficulties figuring out how to mount it.
The second attemt was with a planetary gear from thingiverse which I modifyed to mount on the motor. But the problem on this was, that the planetary gear was quite loud and the desk was still moving too slow.
So, I decided to buy a new motor, which was priced on around 75 CHF, which is much stronger. I also boung a hexagonal rod in the same size as the hand crank and printed a shaft transition to mount the hexagonal rod to the motor.
After this my flatmate helped me by cutting out a part at the back of the desk with his wood router, large enough to fit the motor.
I then printed a plate, which allows to mount the motor on the desk, and doesn't look bad, tough now it is anyway hidden behind the right monitor.
This worked out pretty well and I was quite happy on what we have accomplished. The desk is rated for around 50 Kg which is also roughly my weight, so next to all peripherals I sat on it and the motor (which is rated at 1.5 Nm) was able to rise the plate without any problems (though I was more surprised, that my 3D printed motor mount was able to withstand the pressure).
Electronics
There are a few electronic components built into the desk.
Cable management
I printed some custom cable mounts, to fix them with zip ties along the back of the desk, tough I still want to make some changes for a better look of it.
Relay
Also mounted below the desk, is a x8 relay which switches the power for 3 (of which 2 are currently installed) monitors, motor direction and motor power supply. Two relays are currently unused for future expansion.
End stop
I also mounted two buttons on and below the desk plate, which are directly connected to the relay to cut the power to the motor.
Arduino
The arduino currently only controls the relay.
LED
I also mounted a blue LED strip along the back of the desk behind the monitors slightly tilted towards the wall.
Pheriperals
I currently have two keyboards for two individual VMs I primarily use.
My two monitors are both 28" 4K monitors, also hooked up to individual graphics cards to use two VMs simultaneously. I'm planning to get another monitor in between these two, which I'm waiting for a 4K 120Hz monitor, to use for gaming.
Expansion
I already got some ideas for future expansion on the primary desk.
Light cover
Like I already mentioned in the previous post about the Shelf in my setup which contain the major electronics. - I have difficulties sleeping at night when LED lights of electronics are visible. So I want to make a small cover to hide the arduino, relay and motor power supply.
Distance sensor
I would like to have a distance sensor which reads the current height of my desk, which in future could allow for the implementation of profiles in my control interface, to select the predefined preferred height when standing or sitting, so I don't manually have to stop it or adjust the end stops.
IO ports
I already installed a small USB hub along the LED strip. I would like to have more IO and also multiple USB hubs which could be assigned to different virtual machines running on my computer, to more quickly connect devices to them. Additionally power and ethernet would be a nice thing, to for example quickly hook up a laptop on this desk.
So I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, especially about the capability to adjust the height of the desk. A desk with this height adjustment capability would have on average cost nearly ten time more than this.
Currently I'm still working on a lot of other parts of this project. Also the Web interface to control my room setup, expanded quite more than expected and is still in early development, tough the second prototype of it is already running on my Raspberry Pi.
Thank you for visiting my blog and reading this post. If there are any questions or opinions you like to share, feel free to write a comment on this post or over my various social media channels.
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12018-10-13T11:00Z HE - Roger "Equah" Hürzeler
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