Star Trek Phone Dock Might As Well Be From Picard’s Night Stand

Star Trek is often credited with helping spur the development of technologies we have today — the go-to example being cell phones. When a Star Trek April Fool’s product inspires a maker to build the real thing? Well, that seems par for the course. [MS3FGX] decided to make it so. The 3D printed Star Trek-themed phone dock acts as a Bluetooth speaker and white noise generator. The result is shown off in the video below and equals the special effects you expect to find on the silver screen.

Taking a few liberties from the product it’s based on — which was much larger and had embedded screens — makes [MS3FGX]’s version a little more practical. Two industrial toggle switches control a tech cube nightlight and the internal Bluetooth speaker. An NFC tag behind the phone dock launches the pre-installed LCARS UI app and turns on the phone’s Bluetooth. Despite being a challenge for [MS3FGX] to design, the end product seems to work exactly as intended.

The effort that went into giving the dock an authentic finish really pulls this together as a DIY project. It’s too bad that we can’t buy one for ourselves!

For perhaps the most unique phone dock out there, this man has one embedded in his prosthetic forearm.

[Thanks for the submission, MS3FGX!]

12 thoughts on “Star Trek Phone Dock Might As Well Be From Picard’s Night Stand

    1. At the time of making the video there was an issue in the app where only noises past a certain length played properly due to the time it took the BT speaker to “wake up”. So the more common bleeps/tweet noises LCARS makes wouldn’t work and had to be disabled in favor of the longer tones.

      This has since been fixed in the app.

  1. I don’t often think “Take my money!” but yeah – this is a studio-prop quality build. Well done. I think the beep annoyance can be tuned out of the LCARS UI. I had something like this on my Palm device years ago and the beep problem is real.

    Also, if you want great starship operational noises, play with the “Warp Speed” version on mynoise.net: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/spaceshipNoiseGenerator.php Sadly their app is only available for iDevices, so you have to go through a browser to get there.

    1. the beep problem is real

      Of course it is. The bleeps and bloops are not there to support the presumptive user of the device, they are audio illustrations for the benefit of the viewer of the show.

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