heinzboehmer's 2002 Topaz 6MT Coupe

[George Hill]

Any concerns about the phone potentially going out the window?

[Obioban]

I'm a big fan of the concept of the induktiv Qi charger plus wireless CarPlay, but the execution really needs improvement. As in, the phone slides around and off the Qi happy spot. Even when it is on target, the charger can't quite keep up with a phone doing navigation.

I'm very much hoping with Qi2 coming out, they do an updated version with "magsafe". It would make me 100% satisfied with that solution. It really like the idea of, leave phone in pocket for short drives (and still have it on screen via wireless carplay), or drop it on the qi charger center console for longer drives.

[Mike RT4]

Can you do a RHD one LOL?

[heinzboehmer]

For this week's project, I decided to make a phone mount, as I didn't like any of the products on the market. The design had three hard requirements:

1. Able to be (un)installed in <5s. I only ever want the mount to be visible when my phone is installed, so it has to be easily stashable.
2. Phone has to be above the dash. I really like the placement of the iDrive hump in the E82, so wanted to it to be at about that height.
3. Mount cannot block other interfaces. Can't be in front of cluster, radio, A/C, etc.

My initial approach was to attach a base to the dash bar and have some interface (likely magnetic) come out through the left side dash vent. Should be very solid like this and hidden when the main mount body isn't installed. Some pics of the development of that section:





The idea is sound, but the vent itself has a lot less space than I originally envisioned. This means that I would likely need to use the vents that point at the door as stiffness reinforcements for the long thin cantilever coming from the dash bar piece. So I decided to scrap the dash bar idea and instead make something that just attaches to the vent.

After some iterations, I came up with a design that attaches to the vent very securely:





With that figured out, I moved on to figuring out the ideal location for my phone. Some pics of that process:




And the final product next to a couple earlier prototypes (I think the "scaffolded" one on the left is particularly cool looking, but ultimately was less stiff and bulkier than the ones on the right):




Installed on the car:




Side view of an earlier prototype:



I'm super happy with how this turned out. Installation is extremely easy, there is practically zero vibration when moving and it's entirely out of the way of everything. Roadtrips should be much nicer now!

[heinzboehmer]

Heard my airbox start rattling again so went and checked on it. Turns out the bushings I printed rode up on the posts so much that they were no longer doing their job:



This is what they looked like (well, two of them, the third is lost forever in the engine bay abyss):




They've certainly taken some damage! This might be one of those "replace at every oil change" things. Oh well, they require 0.5 g of material to print and can be installed in 5 min, so not super worried about the short replacement interval.

To combat the riding up issue I created a V2. Part is the same as before, but with a base, which should keep them in place:



I made the base the same thickness as the grey "weatherstripping" on the unfiltered section and notched that out for clearance:



Everything installed:




Let's see how long these last!