What a long title. But it’s an awesome thing! This was pretty much born out of necessity. The 2021 100 acre wood rally was fast approaching. In the dreams of building a better setup for the right seat, the “amazon slap it together tablet + Garmin GPS thingy” needed a replacement.
Enter Monit
Also enter, no way to mount Monit cheaply.
Also also enter, Monit is expensive.
So basically, the goal was to attach the Monit to the roll cage. Pretty simple idea. However, to get this working, you have 2 options: Monit’s expensive route ($55 door mount bracket); or DIY.
I chose DIY for a couple of reasons. The biggest was I knew exactly how it would work, and to be honest, I just needed a time critical excuse to improve my elementary CAD skills. The next reason was it was cheaper!
I wanted something I could mount directly to the roll cage, as all rally cars must have them, its an accessible spot to place it. I already had a “pole” adapter for RAM fittings, so I just needed the RAM arm and something to hold the Monit.
In all fairness, i’m not blind. There is a massive Rally Safe head unit right above the Monit; It does all of the critical tasks your Monit does. However, the Monit can leave the car….recce? Anywho, the Monit does cool stuff like timers and fuel calculations, so personally i’m keeping it.
First step was to start drafting the dimensions. Just a note pad, digital calipers, and time.
Boom. Great. Done. Now the hard part (for Garrett)…CADulation.
Eventually I was able to get that dialed down. It took a while to figure out how make the ball thing. I can’t recall 100% (this was 3 years ago :D), but I think I grabbed a file from thingiverse.com and converted the STL some how.
The initial plan was pretty simple.
– Don’t take away existing functionality of the Monit (i.g. the antena connector and pin connector)
– Leverage the threads for mounting
With the design pretty much mocked up, it was time to do test prints and make any corrections.
So far so good! Now lets try it out!
Perfect! I ended up buying some thumb screws, to make installation MUCH easier. You can also pick one of these up yourself! The newly famed:
3D Printed Monit RAM Mounting Plate
Next up, i’ll see about making the STL available for download.
On deck, various roll cage adapters for RAM. Then just get the Amazon special RAM Arm and you are set!
Okay, until next time. I’m off to go procrastinate more.
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