Magnetic tablet wall mount: Elegant, frameless, detachable

This is not strictly a Home Assistant guide or project. But tablet wall mounts are surely a topic that will sooner or later be of concern for most HA users. I looked for good solutions for quite some time. And I took several detours with questionable decorative value, before I came up with the way that I present to you here.

This mount consists of magnets that framelessly hold a tablet in place about 12mm away from the wall. The whole fixture is invisibly hidden behind the tablet. You can fully detach and reattach the tablet at any time. When attached the magnets hold it in place very firmly. Plastic buffers ensure that the magnets do not snap hard onto each other and break. The convex buffers also make sure that the tablet slides perfectly into place when you attach it.

The final result is light weight and visually appealing.

How this is built

This is a project description but also a guide to build your own.
So let me show you how the whole thing is created.

Here are the parts that you need for the mount itself:

On the left side are the magnets. These are strong Neodymium magnets, 30 mm across and 5 mm thick. They have conical center holes for countersunk screws. You need 3 of these with South pole facing towards the screw head and 3 with North pole up.

These magnets are really strong, especially when used in pairs. You could actually even buy a somewhat smaller diameter.

Below is how each magnet assembly looks. In the second image you can see how the little white plastic screw cap separates the two magnets. This prevents the magnets from breaking when forcefully clicking onto each other and it also perfectly centers the magnets as the convex cap settles into the empty conical hole of the tablet side magnet.

The distance of the drill holes in the wall depends on your tablet size. I used a cheap Fire HD 10, which works very well for over a year now (constantly on power with the battery not inflating). My holes for the Fire are 19 cm horizontally apart and 10 cm vertically.

Take care not to hit any cables of your power supply in the wall when you drill. This is the reason why my junction box is placed out of center of the tablet.

Attention!
Many tablets (including the Fire) have a built in magnet sensor to switch their display off when they are placed in a closed cover. Test your magnet positions and polarities on the tablet BEFORE you drill the holes into the wall. Otherwise your tablet may go dark forever when you later glue the magnets onto it.

After you screwed the three magnets in place, put their counterparts on top of them. At this point we do not yet use the plastic caps between them. This is to make sure that the outer magnets are lying perfectly flat when we glue the tablet onto them.

Now place your tablet on the magnets and center it in all directions. Align it horizonally with a water level and drive in two small steel nails below it to temporarily hold it in place.

Measure the exact distances of the magnets from all sides, take the tablet off the wall and mark the magnet positions on the backside of the tablet.

Fill the marked areas with a patch of epoxy glue.

Let the glue rest until it begins to thicken. When it just starts to lose its honeylike consistency, place it on the nails and carefully push it against the magnets.

When the glue has cured, carefully detach the tablet again, now together with the three glued on magnets. If a bit of glue has entered through the center holes it is possible that it has reached the screw heads. If this happens, try to drive a sharp cutter blade into the gap between the magnets to break them apart. To avoid this risk, place a sheet of cling wrap between the front and rear magnets before glueing.

Unfortunately with one of my tablets I used a bit too much glue and I did not wait long enough for it to thicken. Below you see a good result and a not so good one. You may want to learn from my mistake.

Now place the plastic screw caps on the screws. I fixed them with a bit of normal glue.

For the power supply I used an angled high quality USB cable that I cut in half.

Now it’s time to finally click the tablet to the wall. If you did everything right, the magnets will snap nicely onto each other without a hard metallic sound while the plastic caps act as buffers and centering aids.

Et voilĂ . Nice job.
Enjoy your elegant new mount! :heart_eyes:

12 Likes

Neat! To make it perfect why not printing a case around to hide the cable ?

Sorry to say so, but a casing would be the absolute opposite of what I wanted to visually establish here.

2 Likes

Nice. Have you considered wireless charging?

4 Likes

Nope, but that would really be a great option and would fit the design concept perfectly. I just found that there would be even a budget version: The Fire HD 10 Plus has wireless charging. Unfortunately I have bought our wall tablets over a year ago – long before the HD 10 Plus became available.

I have mine built-in the wall when I created my dressing. I also added a MagicMirror in the toilette see:






1 Like

RE: The jokes displayed at the bottom of the magic mirror.

A joke about school shootings? :man_facepalming:

3 Likes

These usb cables are pretty discrete

and

This is great!! Thank you for sharing. Where do you get the magnets?

1 Like

I got them from a German online shop (www.magnetmax.de) but you also get them on Amazon. Just make sure that you get both types: three times North toward the countersunk head and three times South towards it. On Amazon that can be challenging. The dealers there don’t seem to care much about such nifty details.

Yepp, I know them. Some are too high for the distance to the wall. And they all are not at all invisible if you look at the tablet from the side. In the end a designed version of a normal sized barrel plug won over a miniature sized edgy one.

In fact we had a family jury choosing the sexiest cable. :laughing:

1 Like

You have a page where you explain your magic mirror build?
How did you get that so close to the wall?
Wheres the raspberry feeding the mirror?
Has it voice control too?

@skank please contact the owner of the mirror directly or open another thread. This is about a frameless wall mount. Without school shooting jokes. Thanks.

1 Like

I did not see the bad school joke only when I told me and yes it’s not really funny it’s a module for the MagicMirror which pulls jokes from a site randomly sorry having upset you wasn’t intended

1 Like

Very nice, thank you. I am new here and have some tablets laying around that can function as a wall tabelt, however I wondered about the power supply. You did not fix that USB cable directly onto the 220V net, did you? That is not really clear to me. I hope you can explain. many thanks in advance

Ýou’ll need a 5v wire in the wall. Either a charger type of arrangement, or some sort of electronics like this https://nz.element14.com/mean-well/irm-05-5/power-supply-ac-dc-5v-1a/dp/2815493?st=Irm%2005

1 Like

Mean-Well - as recommend by @nickrout - is a good quality choice. I use that brand a lot and found it to be most reliable.
Of you need to save money, I can also recommend these cheap Hi-Link power supplies:

Hi-link do not have the protections of the meanwell.

1 Like

Just curious…being an “old school” guy that has always avoided strong magnets around any computer equipment, I would not have ever attempted using magnets on any tablet or pc for fear of inducing some sort of adverse effect. I’m assuming this has been fine for you?

1 Like

No problems otherwise.

2 Likes