Custom Apple TV mount

June 06, 2021

Overview

I’ve been looking for more ways to put my new Prusa Mini+ to good use. I have a TV mounted to the wall in my workout room, but I’ve had issues getting the built in airplay to work correctly. I’m also not a big fan of the built in interface for the TV. I decided to pick up a newly released Apply TV 4K for the living room, and move my current first generation 4K model to the workout room. I wanted to find a way to mount it behind the TV to keep things looking clean. I designed a custom mount in Autodesk Fusion 360 and printed it out on my excellent Prusa Mini+.

Designing the mount

I looked at a few examples on Thingiverse before I got started. Nothing there was quite what I wanted, but it was good for inspiration. My main concern was restricting airflow. I feel like I was able to design something that holds the Apple TV securely while also minimally touching it. I decided I wanted my attachment point to be one of the arms on the TV wall mount. Simply taking the width and height measurement for the arm was all that was needed. The bottom of the “legs” have a slight extrusion that creates a tight fit to the arm when it slides on. The last thing I added was a small hole on each side to use with a zip tie to hold the cords behind the TV.

Printing and installing the mount

When using Prusa Slicer to create the gcode, I put the “legs” of the mount as the bottom surface. This did require support material be used, but it was easily removed when the print was finished. The printing process took about 6.5 hours. That was with PLA, .2mm layer height, and 20% infill. The software tried to put support material under the brackets with holes on either side of the mount, but I manual removed those before generating the gcode. It printed just fine without it. Once the printing was completed, I mounted it on the TV mount arm. Everything when together as expected and was sturdy enough to support cords hanging off the side.

Conclusion

This was the first time I’ve really had a legitimate use for my 3D printer. It was a blast designing the mount from scratch then seeing it actually work as intended. I know the interface to the TV mount is custom to my particular TV mount, but if you are interested in getting the .f3d or .stl file, just reach out to me on Mastodon. Thanks for reading.