I’ve found that my personal productivity varies quite a lot based on the degree to which I can keep my workspace organized. Any given day, my desk can contain any or all of the following:

• Two laptops (one for testing, one for research)

• Keyboard/trackball

• Benchtop power supply

• Multi port USB power supply

• External hard drive (for data intensive tasks, such as SDR captures)

• Logic analyzer(s)

• Oscilloscopes

• Soldering station/breadboards

• Microscope

• DSLR

• Fully populated switch

• Multiple devices under test

• Dual monitors

• Lamp

• ...you get the picture

The ideal furniture for this would probably not be a “desk” at all, but more of a workbench with built-in storage, power, and cable management solutions. However, my desk has sentimental value for me, so I think it’s going to be around for the forseeable future. I do have to get work done in the immediate future though, so I have to keep an eye on my desk before it becomes a rat’s nest of assorted cables.

For years, I would simply bind up all of my extra cable with hook-and-loop cable ties, but it can often be time-consuming and fiddly to leave the right amount of slack. Plus, even with the perfect length, where do I place the cable coil? Earlier this year I started 3D printing so I figured I would see how I can improve my work area.

The desk itself is extremely spartan; a simple L shape with two glass panels on each side and a quarter-circle wood panel at the joint. Using hardware to permanently affix cable management on glass is a no-go (at least for me), and I want to avoid drilling holes in the metal in case I need to change things up later. Adhesive solutions are an option, but “removable, reuseable” adhesives are usually bad at being both removable and reusable.

At a high level, I settled on a concept where I would use a series of clips that would “snap” into place around the metal channel for maximum flexibility and configurability. My first version of the clip was extremely simple. Below the structure-hugging most-of-a-rectangle, I placed an open curve that curled in slightly before the edge, making cable insertion simple, but reducing the likelihood that cables would fall out of place. The diameter of the loop was large enough to hold pretty much any cable I wanted to throw at it. Construction in FreeCAD was extremely simple: create sketch, extrude, export as STL, done.

I printed a few test clips in solid PLA (4 perimeters with a 0.8mm nozzle, if I recall correctly) and found that the clip was extremely rigid when adding or removing a cable, so I scaled down the Z-axis by 50% in Cura and tried again. That solved the stiffness problem, but in general, the cables still looked more messy than I like.

It seemed the root of the problem was the variation in cable diameters. The single path was holding both power cables and data cables (USB, ethernet, HDMI), so if I had to move the devices attached to the the smaller, more flexible data cables, they would tangle around the stiffer power cables and among themselves. Plus, I was adding and removing data cables more often that I was changing out power cables, so I decided to add individual paths for data cable management.

Version 2 visually looked much better and greatly improved data cable accessibility. If I needed to adjust something’s location on my desktop, the cables were neatly following the far perimeter of the desk, out of the way of what I might be working on at any given time, but able to be adjusted without getting out of my seat. Not all data cables have the same diameter, however, so I picked a diameter somewhere in the middle that didn’t seem to hold any one type of cable perfectly, but kind-of, sort-of held most of them.

I attempted to solve this by adding a lid to the data channels; this was admittedly a very rough, friction fit solution that possibly could have been improved, but after seeing how fast and how far the lids deformed under constant pressure (as PLA tends to do), I scrapped it and went back to the drawing board.

I used the same basic philosophy that worked for the original power cable management loop. Since some of the data cables I use are very thin, I minimized the gap in the gateway to ensure that the clip is able to retain the cables. I also gave the it a slight angle for ease of insertion. Finally I added fillets on the edges for both aesthetics and to reduce wear on the cables.

I’m pretty happy with the results from version 3. I have 12 clips around the outside perimeter and that seems to be keeping desktop entropy at bay and if I need more, I can always print a few for the sides. I might create a higher capacity version or add in a coil hook, but this is working well for right now.