5 Useful Travel Gadgets You Can Actually 3D Print – BGR

Visiting interesting places around the world is fun and enriching. What’s substantially less fun and enriching is trying to do all of that traveling without having any of your personal tech get tangled or broken, or otherwise overtly inconveniencing you. While you can buy various helpful travel gadgets on Amazon, you can also use a 3D printer to custom-make things like storage for chargers and earphones, phone mounts, and photo tripods.

While you could technically buy storage and stands at an airport gift shop in a pinch, it’s anyone’s guess whether it would even have gadgets that fit your particular travel-tech needs, including your phone, charger, headphones, and more. You won’t know until you’ve already spent the money and opened the packaging. Instead of taking that risk, use a 3D printer at home to create various safe storage and helpful gadgets that you know for certain will fit your needs. You can tailor these gadgets to whatever technology you prefer, but if you need a jumping-off point, you can find it on the most popular 3D printing enthusiast websites like Printables and Creality Cloud. Here are five ideas to get your imagination swirling.

Your smartphone may fit fairly cleanly in your pocket while you’re traveling, but what about its companion charger? Odds are good that the charger is just sitting unprotected in a pocket of your carry-on, electrical prongs fully exposed and vulnerable to damage and jostling. The last thing you want is to pull out your charger after landing, only to find it’s been bent out of shape. To keep your charger safe, try 3D printing a protective case for it.

Creality Cloud user Idea mx conceptualized a one-size-fits-all 3D-printed storage case for most smartphone chargers. The linchpin is an internal rotating plug receiver, which you can plug your charger prongs into to keep them protected. There are two different versions of this receiver, for both U.S. and E.U. charging prongs, so you can print whichever one you need. The case also has enough space to store the charger’s cables, as well as a locking latch to ensure it won’t pop open while in transit. All of this will help to keep your charger safe, as well as generally compartmentalized for cleaner storage in your bag.

Wireless earbuds may be the standard for on-the-go listening these days, but there’s still a need for wired earphones: many planes, especially older ones, require you to plug wired earphones or headphones into a seat jack to use the seat-back screen. It wouldn’t hurt to have a pair on hand, especially with wired headphones becoming cool again. Of course, that leads to the separate problem of dealing with tangled-up earphone wires, but this can be solved easily enough with a little 3D printing ingenuity.

In order to keep earphone cables properly taut and protected from damage, Creality Cloud user Nagaraj developed a small spool for keeping them safely wrapped up. The spool has several openings on its outside, into which you insert the connector of your earphones. After that, just wrap the cord around the spool to keep it nice and taut, resting the earphones in the inner cavity. Just like that, they’re kept safe and easily stored in your bag or pocket. This design also works with standalone, detachable earphone and headphone cords, which is great if you’ve got a separate pair of larger headphones with an optional physical connection and want to plug them into a seat-back screen.

Even if an airplane has a seat-back screen, you may not be interested in whatever shows or movies it’s playing. Some planes opt to use pop-out stands for smartphones instead, but these stands are firmly attached to the seat, which may or may not be at your personal eye level. If you want to look at your phone on a plane and need a stand that suits your particular needs, you can use a 3D printer to make a convenient, adjustable one.

Printables user SquidgyPlastic is a career commuter and got tired of holding or awkwardly propping up their phone on flights. To fix the problem, they designed a 3D-printed adjustable airplane phone holder. This simple hooking mount consists of a right-angled tab designed to be inserted into the gap of a typical fold-out tray and an adjustment mechanism with a couple of nuts and bolts. Just insert the tab into your seat-back tray, set the adjustment to your eye level, and place your phone in the hook. SquidgyPlastic adds that the adjustment is particularly helpful for keeping your phone at eye level even when the passenger in front of you is reclining their seat.

If you wear an Apple Watch while traveling, keeping it charged can be a bit of a chore, both on and off a plane. While its companion magnetic fast charger doesn’t need to be plugged directly into the watch, it does need a flat surface to rest on, and depending on the location of the outlet it’s plugged into, especially on a plane, you might not have a surface readily available. If you need a little platform to charge your Apple Watch on, just 3D print one.

Finding the magnetic charger with their Apple Watch Series 6 inconvenient while traveling, Printables user TC designed a 3D-printed combination storage case and charging platform. The print consists of a simple fold-open case, with a cavity inside where you can wrap the charger’s cable. The USB-A plug protrudes from a slot at one end, and the charging pad pokes out the top. With the charging pad set up, you can plug it directly into a wall adapter, and the case will keep everything held up firmly, creating a simple shelf you can rest your Apple Watch on while it charges. TC does note that they specifically made this design with the Series 6 in mind, and that they don’t know if it would work with other Apple Watch chargers.

It’s fun to take pictures with your smartphone while you’re traveling, whether of scenery or of yourself. To take good pictures, a tripod would naturally be beneficial, but a full tripod isn’t exactly something you can easily store in your travel luggage or carry-on bag. If you want a tripod that can adapt to your needs and travel storage options, warm up the 3D printer and create one with telescoping legs.

Printables user LoboCNC designed a particularly clever option for those who need both a table-sized and full standing tripod for their smartphone: a 3D-printed telescoping tripod. It’s a bit of a complicated project, requiring some additional hardware like nuts, bolts, superglue, and a rubber band, but once it’s done, you’ve got a tripod that can sit on a table or desk, then extend its legs up to 45 inches (116 centimeters) for taking free-standing pictures. The rubber band is used in the adjustable phone clamp, which can be tightened or loosened to fit your specific model of smartphone. LoboCNC adds that the clamp can be redesigned to fit a phone in portrait mode if you prefer to take vertical photos.