Press-fit Kit

I go hiking a lot, and there are two things that annoy me to no end when I pull out my iPhone to take pictures:

1. Panoramic videos of landscapes are usually shaky because it’s hard to stabilize the phone.

2. Taking group pictures is no fun because the photographer is left out :(

I built a press-fit cardboard kit which solves both of these problems with only 8 oz of cardboard!

Selfie-stick in 'Selfie' mode

The selfie-stick has two “modes”. The “Selfie” mode as pictured above, and a “SteadyCam” mode which lets you take smooth videos by weighing down the lower half of the stick:

Selfie-stick in 'SteadyCam' mode

The bottom of the selfie-stick is weighed down with a water bottle in order to stabilize the iPhone camera.

Here is a comparison between iPhone video filming with and without the selfie-stick:

The biggest learning curve for this project was the software, as I struggled to find good 2d shape drawing software. I am very familiar with Adobe Illustrator, but it doesn’t contain good support for parametric shapes or boolean operations. I ended up settling on Rhino, and I used Grasshopper to model the selfie-stick parameters. I definitely missed some features from Illustrator, but I think that it helped to gain more familiarity with the Rhino package.

And finally, a selfie!