Working from home has many challenges, including where to put your phone and keep it charged when your desk is less than optimal. This solution allows you to both small screen your favourite newscast / YouTube channel and keep your phone charged.

Use whatever materials you have at hand, I scrounged and put this together in 30 mins.

Supplies

Be creative here with your approach. I used timber to give me a cleaner finished project, but you just as easily use milk cartons, steel, or even cardboard.

You will need

1) Charging cable or wireless stand for you phone
2) old door hinge or whatever you can scrounge.
3) 20mm c clamp
4) scrap timber
5) screws

Step 1: The Layout.

Plan where you want this to go first. I figured dead centre as my laptop sits to the left and the right was for drinks, mouse, headset etc.

Step 2: Clamping to Your Monitor Stand

You need to find a way to mount your stand.

An earlier version just sat on the desk.

As i lost my home office desk to the wife and son, I jury rigged up a dual monitor stand with 20mm threaded pipe. This gave me a perfect upright to attach the clamp. As you can see it is simply screwed around the pipe, with enough play to tilt.

Step 3: Angling for Your Best

With the base clamped to the upright pipe, what to do with getting the right angle?
I took an old door hinge and bent it in the bench vise (percussive alignment) so it did not move freely.
This was then screwed to the phone cradle to give me 50 degrees of movement.

Step 4: The Cradle

This was the most challenging, how to add my wireless charger. Your goal here really is simple, creating an L shape to hold the phone up, and a platform to screw onto the base.

I tried a couple of options and decided to go with a pressure fit, cutting timber at the right depth into angles, before screwing these down to the base. I reasoned that I may want the cable to go out either side. I added a scrap piece at the bottom as a stop, if you had just the cable you would likely just cut a channel here.

This worked really well, and if I need a vertical format, it still sits on the base for a charge.

I decided to run the cable out the top rather than the bottom to be able to clear the base, and as the cable is running from the USB port off the monitor.