The IKEA BEKANT sit/stand desk is kind of a lifesaver — even if you don’t personally go between sit and stand much, the adjustability makes sharing the desk a breeze. Sharing was the case in [Matthias]’ house during the pandemic, as he and his wife took turns using the desk. Switching between their two preferred heights quickly became annoying, so [Matthias] engineered LYFT, a replacement controller that stores up to four settings.
In addition, the new SAMD21-based controller allows them to raise and lower the desk without having to hold the button down. And finally, having a digital readout showing the position is just plain cool. As you’ll see in the manual (PDF), LYFT is as easy to set up and use as the average flat-packed product.
In order to make this work, [Matthias] had to figure out how the desk’s motors communicate out of the box, and he did so with the help of a BEKANT controller project by [Greg Cormier]. You won’t find LYFT at the blue and yellow, at least not yet; for now, you’ll have to shop Tindie or build it yourself.
I went to school for drafting ~30 years ago. They had standing-height desks with tall “drafting chairs”. IMHO it is a cheaper, faster, just overall better solution. Stand when you want. Sit when you want. No need to make any desk or chair changes.
Just search “drafting chairs” and you’ll find a million.
I bought a $10 “Laptop riser”. The kind with legs that unfold in 3 parts at any angle. it has a lip to stop the laptop from sliding but turned around it just is a perfectly adjustable height keyboard rise and incline and came wit a little side plate to hold my mouse at the right height.
if folds away nicely next to my desk in 1 minute when i need to sit.
It seems that there might be a name collision between this project and the ride-share service that competes with Uber?
It’s a Swedish word that means “Lift”, fully in line with all other IKEA names
I can see the appeal of this if you already have a Bekant desk and wish you had presets, but a quick search on amazon turns up plenty of desks with similar controls for less than the Bekant desk costs, and far less than Bekant + this addon. It’s a hard sell when you’re making home grown products where mass produced equivalents already exist, and this doesn’t seem to really add anything above and beyond the alternatives.
And on top of that the design of the desk is such that it can be wobbly at height (according to BTOD).