An iPad Hoist for the Sleepy and Lazy

Humanity has perfected passive entertainment in the living room. We have comfy couches for lounging and the scientific research to help us mount our 80” TVs at the perfect height on the wall. But the bedroom? That’s another story and top scientists still haven’t figured out a comfortable way to watch YouTube videos on a tablet while lying down in bed. But Will didn’t let science hold him back; he turned to engineering to build this iPad hoist that is perfect for the sleepy and lazy.

In his pursuit of cozy horizontal binge watching, Will decided he needed a hands-free way to hold an iPad directly over his face and for it to get out of his way without any effort when the blue light can no longer keep his eyelids open. His solution is a kind of hoist mounted above his bed, directly over the point where he usually puts his face. That hoist carries an iPad holder and, with a simple voice command, it will lower that down until it is in position a few inches above his nose. When sleep draws near, another voice command will cause the hoist to retract back up to the ceiling.

The hoist is a mostly 3D-printed rig mounted on the ceiling. It reels in and out thin rope that raises and lowers the iPad. An ESP32-WROOM-32 development board does that with a NEMA 17 stepper motor through a DRV8825 driver. To provide homing capability, Will made the rope pass in front of a light sensor. That detects a dark spot on the rope that Will colored in with black Sharpie. That dark spot causes a drop in the light sensor output, indicating that the rope has been reeled-in to the home position.

Alexa handles the voice commands in the way that is typical for DIY projects: by making the ESP32 emulate an Alexa-compatible light. Because Alexa thinks the device is a light, it can really only handle two states (on and off). That can be annoying for other kinds of projects, but it works fine for this hoist, because “all the way up” and “all the way down” are the only two positions that matter.

Now Will’s arms will never get sore while he’s lying in bed, binging Hackster’s videos on YouTube.