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Direct TV: Motorized rotating stand lets you point the screen to where it’s needed most.

TV SPINNER

Motorized lazy Susan aims the screen where it’s needed. By Alan Mellovitz

Space can be a precious commodity when you live in a shared dorm room. However, if you allocate space efficiently, you can transform a 10'× 10' room from a confining cell to a desirable and pleasurable living area. It can be a challenge on move-in day to create a solution that satisfies the needs of two strangers. More likely than not, the room unintentionally becomes split into two longitudinal sections, and each roommate must try to respect the other’s sector, accommodating TVs, computers, video games, tools, wires, large boxes of Dunkaroos, live panda bears, and/or any other strange possessions and hobbies that have the power to annoy.

I know firsthand that the typical hardworking college student vitally needs entertainment. Yet under cramped dormitory circumstances, amusement

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sacrifices must sometimes be made. To reduce the need for such sacrifices, I recalled that my 10'× 10' room had a third dimension: an 8' ceiling. I thought, why not suspend a lightweight flat-screen TV/com-puter monitor in this unused airspace? And while I was at it, why not make the screen rotate to any viewing angle anywhere in the room, with more than 180 degrees of rotation? That way the screen could generously face the roommate who needed it, wherever and whenever circumstances demanded. Here’s how I built my motorized rotary LCD TV mount, after dusting off an old box of Legos.

Selection and Placement First, consider what piece of equipment you would like to suspend and rotate (computer screen or TV), and where you would want to view it. I bought

Photography by A.J. Kane