Reading Arm Clip

thingiverse

With the rise in use of e-books as replacements for textbooks, as well as libraries possibly being off limits for these times in dealing with COVID, I believe there is a fundamental issue that comes with the use of e-books. On a desktop computer, a mouse can be used to easily highlight text to help keep your place when reading the e-book but when it comes to using a laptop without an available mouse or a tablet where the inaccuracy of using your finger to highlight, things become more difficult. In addition, with how reading on screens causes more problems than reading on paper (such as losing your place or large amounts of texts being more difficult to digest all at once), having a gadget that physically helps keep your place could help combat these problems. My design is meant to clip onto a standard laptop screen size or a tablet used in portrait mode and act like a combination of a bookmark and a drafting arm. What issues did you come up against? Trying to figure out a size that can be used for both laptops and tablets in regards to the actual clip length as well as the arm. If you could redesign this again what would you change? Rather than using a fastener and a spring of some sort to clip onto screens, perhaps finding a way to determine how much a material will bend back into a certain form and making the clip a single item that holds onto the screen, not unlike a paper clip. How would 3D printing help strengthen your design? Using water-soluble support material, it could be possible to create the arm already slotted into the clip. 3D printing could be used to create various custom lengths for use with the variety of different laptop and tablet sizes that exist, rather than just trying to make a one size fits all design.