Google Mini Mount
A Google Home Mini is a puck that wants a flat surface, and every flat surface in a house is already spoken for. This is a printed cradle that screws to the wall and holds it there instead — off the counter, out of the way of the toaster, with its microphones up at head height where they can actually hear you.
The other half of the job is the cable. A Mini sitting on a shelf trails a cord down the back of the furniture; a Mini on a wall trails it down the middle of the paint, which is worse. Getting the cable short, flat and hidden is most of what makes this look deliberate rather than improvised.
Parts
Some links below are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases — at no extra cost to you. It helps keep these guides free. Outside the US, they should send you to your own Amazon store; if one doesn't, searching the part number there will find it.
- Google Home Mini — the first-generation puck, the one with a micro-USB port on the back
- PLA+ filament for the bracket, or matte PLA if it is going somewhere you look at every day — matte hides layer lines, and this part sits in a room rather than in a box
- Drywall anchor assortment — 112 pieces, you need two of them and the screws that come with them
- #8 × 1/2 in wood screws if you hit a stud and can skip the anchors
- Right-angle micro-USB cable, 1 ft — a 3-pack, and the single part that most changes how this looks
- Dual-port USB wall charger, 2.4 A — Google’s adapter has its cable moulded in, so replacing the cable means bringing your own plug
- Cord raceway to hide the drop to the outlet, or self-adhesive cable clips if the run is short enough to just tack down
- Self-adhesive rubber bumpers — a couple inside the cradle stop the Mini rattling and stop the print marking its fabric
- 3M VHB tape as the no-drill alternative, if you rent
This is for the first-generation Google Home Mini (2017). The Nest Mini that replaced it in 2019 has a wall-mount hole moulded into its base and a barrel jack instead of micro-USB, so it needs neither this bracket nor the cable — hang it on a screw and use the adapter in the box.
Print settings
This is a bracket that holds a device off a wall on two screws, and that decides most of the settings. The load lives in the screw bosses and in the joint where the cradle meets the back plate, and both of those are carried by perimeters, not by infill — so spend the plastic on walls.
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Layer height | 0.2 mm |
| Perimeters | 4 |
| Infill | 30% |
| Supports | None, with the back plate on the bed |
| Material | PLA+, or PETG in a sunny room |
| Orientation | Flat wall-facing face down |
Print it with the flat back against the bed. That gets you the one surface that has to be genuinely flat for free, and it puts the screw holes vertical so they need no supports.
PLA is fine on an interior wall. Print it in PETG if the wall gets afternoon sun through a window — PLA softens and creeps under a constant load in a hot room, and the failure mode is the cradle slowly drooping over a summer rather than snapping.
Mounting
-
Pick the spot before you print in a colour. Head height or a little above, away from a corner, and not directly above a sink, a hob or a vent. The Mini’s microphones are on top and they hear a room better from high on a wall than from a worktop, which is the actual reason to do this.
-
Plug the cable in first. Once the Mini is seated in the cradle you cannot reach the micro-USB port, and the right-angle plug wants to be turned so the cable exits downwards. Sort that out on the bench.
-
Hold the bracket against the wall and mark the two holes with a pencil. Eyeball it level against a door frame or the edge of a picture — a bracket that is a degree off reads as crooked once the Mini is in it.
-
Drill and set the anchors. The bit size is stamped on the anchor itself. Tap each one flush, then screw the bracket on. If you have hit a stud, throw the anchors away and drive a #8 wood screw straight in.
-
Snug the screws, then stop. Driving them home in a printed part splits the boss, and it splits it on the last quarter turn, when you think you are done.
-
Stick two rubber bumpers inside the cradle where it touches the Mini’s fabric, drop the Mini in base-first, and check it does not rock.
-
Run the cable down to the nearest outlet in the raceway, or tack it with clips if it is a short hop. Cut the raceway a little long and trim it — you cannot add a centimetre back.
Two things on the Mini itself have to stay reachable. The microphone mute switch is on the back edge, right beside the power port, which is exactly where a cradle wants to wrap around — check you can still flick it with the Mini mounted. And the volume controls are taps on the left and right of the fabric top, so a cradle that grips the fabric rather than the rubber base will turn the volume up every time you push the Mini back into place.
In Home Assistant
A mounted Mini is a speaker on a wall, and Home Assistant already knows how to
talk to it — the Google Cast integration discovers it and gives you a
media_player entity. Point a tts.speak action at that entity and the thing
you screwed to the hallway wall becomes the doorbell announcement, the
laundry-is-done announcement, and the you-left-the-garage-open announcement.
That is the argument for putting it in a hallway or a landing rather than in a room where a person already is. A speaker somewhere nobody sits is the one that gets heard everywhere.
Files & downloads
The source files for this project aren't in the repo yet — there's nothing to download
beyond the notes. They land in projects/google-mini-mount/ when they do, and this
section fills itself in.