The goal of this build is to get Gaia GPS running on a tablet right where I can see it while I am trying to navigate. I love the Garmin Zumo XT GPS device but the maps on it really aren't quite up to what the device is marketed for. The Garmin is marketed for overlanding but it doesn't natively show the kind of smaller roads and trails passable by dual sport motorcycles. The section of the Souther California BDR that I was riding this weekend isn't even on the Garmin Zumo XT.
Gaia GPS runs great on my phone, but I like to conserve my phone battery, my phone shuts down when it gets too hot out, and I've heard that people who mount their phones have trouble with the optical image stabilization getting damaged on their iPhones. I don't really want my phone banging around in 110 degree heat when I might need it.
This is the Acer tablet that I chose to mount. It's marketed as ruggedized but does not seem especially rugged. It has a long battery life though and it is water resistant. This was the first step in my design process. I traced the tablet on a piece of paper and started to think about where I wanted some anchor points to hold it.
One of the big reasons I wanted to make a tablet mount rather than buy one (other than because I thought my mud-building friend would find it more interesting if I made one) was to be able to mount it with two RAM balls instead of one. It seemed to me that the commercially available ones I was finding mounted with only one RAM ball and I highly doubt that the tablet would stay in place on one ball with the kind of riding I do.
This first design was looking promising, but I decided that I wanted more variety in potential ball positions. I wanted more variety to make it easier to adapt to different bikes, but also because I don't want both balls mounted in parallel with the same axis running between them, parallel to the width of the tablet. I want them offset. I want one ball to hang lower than the other one. In this specific instance. I feel like it's more stable with them offset a little.
This is my second design, and here I'm using the nylon spacers that I am going to use to govern the amount of pinch I get between the front clamping plates and the back plate. I'm being careful not to block any ports, lights, or buttons and I want to make it as easy as posible to disconnect the power cable and button up the power port when it starts to rain. I plan on using this on a ride where it starts and stops raining frequently.
I'm getting a feel here for where the holes would need to be drilled for the through bolts to get these nylon spacers where they need to be to get a snug grip on the tablet.
My workfolow was to make a very free, eyeball sketch of the design with pencil on paper. I wanted to edit that sketch though in Adobe Illustrator, print it out again, and use that edited print as a cutting guide for the steel. That's a good workflow, but you have to be very careful to make sure that the finished print-out is exactly to scale with the original drawing. To make that happen, I put several marks on my diagram spaced at known intervals. Here 7". That way, when I took a photo of the sketch with my phone and imported it into Illustrator (I didn't use a scanner, just my phone) I could stretch the diagram to the exact length at all the reference points once I vectorized it.
Here I am verifying one of those 7" reference distances on my Adobe Illustrator diagram.
Once I had the print-out of the edited sketch, I roughly cut it out and then used spray adhesive to stick it onto the steel. I didn't put a huge amount of effort into the sketch at this point because I didn't know if the adhesive would hold effectively or if the paper would instantly ignite once I got the angle grinder going on it.
The cutting guide is stuck onto the steel now. I did some light editing of the sketch in Illustrator.
The paper held up very well to the angle grinder, as it turned out. So did the adhesive. There was no problem at all with any part of the process. I could make as many passes as I wanted, working up to the cut line, without worrying that the template wasn't going to hold up.
I don't usually grind in these gloves since they're not too protective. But I got kind of attached to these gloves recently so I figured I'd risk it just because I liked the idea of wearing them. They wouldn't really protect me from a grinder strike though.
"Can I keep these?" Yeah. Of course.Take all the gloves you want.
Here I was getting closer to my finished cut line. Art this point I was mostly just getting a feel for how the paper and adhesive would react to the grinder. It was really not a problem at all.