Printed parts, prototypes, and lessons about printing.
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Open a Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer .3mf or .gcode.3mf and see every plate — thumbnail, print time, filament per slot with colours in grams, metres and cost — the objects with their parts and modifiers, the printer, process and filament settings, and each plate's G-code, which opens in the G-code viewer or costs out in the filament job planner.
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Look up a Bambu Lab HMS code (XXXX_XXXX_XXXX_XXXX) or print error (XXXX_XXXX) and see it taken apart — module, AMS unit, part or slot, severity — with a short meaning and what to do for about 210 common codes, and a link to Bambu's wiki page. Paste a printer report and every code in it is decoded.
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Build a set of Fusion 360 user parameters with each expression checked the way Fusion reads it (units, functions, if()), a configurations table of variants, hole and shaft sizes for ISO fits or printed clearances, and export them as the CSV Fusion's Change Parameters dialog imports, a ParameterIO file, or a Python script.
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Open a STEP, IGES or BREP file in the browser — the assembly tree with each part's visibility and colour, measuring (distances, CAD edge lengths, hole diameters from round edges, face areas), a section plane, an exploded view, size, volume and mass — and export STL or GLB, or hand parts to the mesh tools.
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One page for every Klipper (Moonraker), OctoPrint and Bambu Lab (LAN mode) printer on your network — state, job, progress, time left, layer, temperatures with a graph, webcam, filament, and for Bambu printers the AMS spools and decoded HMS messages — with pause, resume, cancel and start, alerts when a print finishes, fails or a printer sits idle, and a job queue. Through a small relay you run, directly, or as a simulated demo farm.
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Metal casting for a hobby foundry — an alloys table with pouring temperatures, shrink and hazards; metal needed from a volume, an STL or a pattern's weight (the wax-to-metal rule) with crucible size and number of melts; sand-casting allowances, Bernoulli choke area, pouring time, gating ratios and Chvorinov risers, flask and sand mix; investment powder and water and wax or PLA burnout schedules on a graph; lost foam; the energy, fuel and time to melt; a crucible-furnace build; and a printable safety checklist.
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Stream G-code from the browser over Web Serial to a GRBL, grblHAL or FluidNC CNC router or laser, or a Marlin 3D printer — with jogging, work zero, overrides, a live toolpath preview, a bounds check, and a console.
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Book the laser, the printers and the CNC at a makerspace — day and week views, drag to book, opening hours, slot length, longest booking and a gap between bookings per machine, clashes refused, repeating maintenance blocks, who's on now and next, a printable day sheet for the door, and .ics in and out. Runs on one shared tablet; sync another device by file.
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Price a job for a member or a customer — sheet goods by area, filament and resin by weight, consumables, machine time at each machine's member and non-member rate (the laser estimated from cut length and speed), labour, design time, setup, waste and markup, discount, VAT or sales tax and a deposit — and print the quote with its line items and terms. Saved quotes, duplicates, any currency.
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Resin for parts cast in a mould — volume from a shape, an STL, water displacement or a fill test, minus inserts; polyurethane, epoxy, UV and polyester classes with A and B by weight and volume; cold casting with metal or stone powder by weight and by volume; fillers and pigment; per part, per batch, kits and cost per part; how many moulds one mix fills before it gels; cure time against temperature; exotherm and shrinkage checks; slush and rotational shells; and a printable plan.
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How much rubber a mould takes — one- and two-part block moulds, cut moulds, brush-on glove moulds and poured blanket moulds, from the part's size, a shape or an STL — with A and B by weight and volume, pot life and demould times, an inhibition checker, release agents for each pair of materials, degassing and pressure notes, mother mould materials, and a printable step list.
Article ·
Figures, spacecraft and retro machines I have made as 3-D models with Meshy.ai and prepared for printing — mostly people as Lemmings, Amiga history and 1980s TV. This page grows as I add models.
Article ·
The administration is starting a new military force, so I designed the one I'd expect: the AI Force — a squad of very typical geeks in hero suits, with a nod to Atari Force from the 1980s comics.
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I'm a big fan of the alien genre, so I wanted some funny aliens in my house: greys drinking coffee, on the phone, and doing see-no-evil — modelled in Meshy, printed, and hand painted.
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Space: 1999 was a show I loved watching as a kid, so two of my 3-D models are from it: an Eagle Transporter and a Moonbase Alpha astronaut.
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Quote 3D prints from the slicer's G-code (PrusaSlicer, OrcaSlicer, Bambu Studio, Cura), a sliced Bambu / Orca 3MF (one line per plate) or a model's volume — material and waste, electricity and heat-up, machine wear, failure allowance, setup and post-processing labour, extras, markup, a minimum charge and tax — with saved printer and material profiles and a printable quote.
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The full Gridfinity designer — every gridfinity-extended generator with all its parameters, and tool inserts with pockets traced from a photo of your tools (or drawn, or picked from a parametric parts catalogue), rendered by real OpenSCAD in your browser and exported as STL, 3MF, or SVG / DXF sheet layers for foam, plywood and MDF.
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Fix STL, 3MF and OBJ models that are not closed solids — weld, clean, remove debris, orient, split non-manifold edges, stitch slits, fill holes, union overlapping shells, or rebuild by voxel remesh — with the problems shown in 3-D, a step-by-step report, a before/after deviation map, and a hand-over to the mold maker and model splitter.
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Beam solver for simply supported, cantilever, propped, fixed and overhanging beams with point, uniform, triangular and moment loads — shear, moment, slope and deflection diagrams, stresses from a section-property calculator, steel, aluminium, wood and 3D-printed materials — plus Euler and Johnson column buckling and a drawable 2-D truss solver with tension, compression and member buckling.
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ISO 286 hole and shaft limits computed from the standard — H7/g6, H7/k6, H7/p6 or any class to 500 mm — with clearance, transition or interference drawn as tolerance zones; a size-range table; the ANSI B4.1 classes; thread dimensions for metric, UNC/UNF, BSP and NPT; a thread identifier; ISO 273 clearance holes; and the IT grade your 3D printer really holds.
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Mechanisms you can play with — an animated four-bar linkage with the Grashof check, its type, the coupler curve and the transmission angle; slider-cranks with stroke and quick return; disc cams with uniform, harmonic, cycloidal and 3-4-5 motion, pressure angle and undercut check; a 2- or 3-link robot arm you drag by the hand, with both inverse-kinematics solutions; and differential-drive kinematics and odometry for small robots.
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Turn a photo into a printable lithophane — flat, curved, a cylinder lamp shade, a globe band, a heart or a framed shape — with a backlit preview, or into an embossed relief; make raised or engraved signs and nameplates in Google Fonts with the layer to change filament at; and extrude an SVG into coloured solids. STL and 3MF out, closed and manifold.
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Split a model that is too big for your printer into pieces that fit — suggested cuts (fewest pieces, small seams, no slivers, little support, cuts at narrow waists) or your own planes placed with a gizmo — with pins, keys, dovetails, a lip, magnets or bolts on the cut faces, every piece laid flat and numbered, and STL / 3MF plates plus an assembly README.
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Turn an STL, 3MF, OBJ or STEP part into what you need to cast it — pick the process first: a printed rigid mould (automatic parting, keys, sprue, risers, vents, bolts, inserts), a silicone mould (a fitted pour box, a printed master, or brush-on silicone in a printed mother mould), a plaster slip-casting mould with printable case moulds, or a metal-casting pattern (lost-PLA investment pattern with sprue, feeder and flask, or a split sand pattern with match plate and core box) — with step-by-step instructions and quantities, exported as STL, 3MF, OBJ, STEP and DXF, laid flat on your printer's bed.
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Size the moving parts of a printer, CNC or robot — closed-loop and open timing belts (GT2/GT3/HTD/T5/MXL), lead and ball screws (efficiency, back-driving, torque, critical speed, buckling), DC motors and gearbox ratios from Kt/Kv and stall figures, hobby servo torque at an arm, and whether an axis will move at your acceleration.
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Printable parts from a few numbers — Gridfinity bins and drawer-filling baseplates to the spec, PCB enclosures from a size or a KiCad / DXF outline (standoffs, snap / screw / sliding lids, USB-C, RJ45 and other cut-outs, vents, lid text), knobs for D, knurled and round shafts, ISO and UNC/UNF threads with print clearance, nuts, bolts and screw-lid boxes — previewed in 3-D and exported as STL, 3MF or STEP.
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Break-even between making processes on a log quantity axis, worst-case and root-sum-square tolerance stack-up, Cp and Cpk from pasted measurements with a histogram, surface roughness by process against a bacterium and the 0.8 µm hygienic line, and ASTM F1980 accelerated-ageing times.
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Drag an idealised elbow model and watch the perpendicular moment arm, the cord force (with and without the forearm's own weight) and the cord travel change through the sweep, with the lever class and every assumption listed — plus average contact pressure with everything it cannot tell you, and the energy of a fall.
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Tissues against engineering materials on one log scale of stiffness and strength, with the stress-shielding ratio; polymer glass-transition and service temperatures against laundry and steam-sterilisation temperatures, with the evidence gaps each figure leaves; and thermal expansion with the borosilicate versus soda-lime glass comparison.
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Steps per mm for belts, lead screws, and gear reductions with microstepping; the resolution you can rely on; the reference voltage for A4988, DRV8825, and TMC2208/2209 drivers; and a corner-speed and step-rate check against your controller.
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Find a 3D printing problem by what it looks like — stringing, warping, ringing, layer shifts, under-extrusion, resin failures and more — then work through its causes, most likely first, with the fix and a quick test for each.
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Extruder e-steps (Marlin) and rotation_distance (Klipper), belt and lead-screw steps/mm, flow from a single-wall print, scale compensation, Z offset from a measured first layer, pressure-advance and input-shaping notes, and for Bambu Studio / OrcaSlicer the flow dynamics K, flow ratio, max volumetric speed and retraction tests.
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Paste a bed mesh from Klipper, Marlin (bilinear or UBL), Prusa G81, or printer.cfg and see it as a heatmap and a rotatable 3D surface, with flatness statistics, tilt from a plane fit, how far to turn each levelling screw, and a before/after comparison.
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Finger-jointed laser/CNC boxes with kerf compensation, dividers, and eight lids — including living, knuckle, side-pivot, and bought hinges with magnet catches — nested onto sheets as SVG or DXF; and 3D-printable enclosures with PCB standoffs, connector cut-outs, and a snap, friction, screw, or hinged lid (print-in-place, snap-fit, filament pin, flexure) as STL — with a 3D preview that opens the lid and flags collisions.
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How much filament is left on a spool, length ↔ weight for any material and diameter, the full cost of a print — material, electricity, wear, and failures — a job planner that reads a slicer's G-code and costs a batch across plates with labour, and a materials reference table.
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Generate CNC programs for surfacing, rectangular and circular pockets, drill patterns with pecking, and profile cut-outs with tabs — plus 3D-printer first-layer, retraction, and e-steps calibration programs — with a live preview.
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See a CNC or 3D-printer G-code file in 3D — rapids, cuts, extrusion, travel — scrub through it, step layer by layer, and get dimensions, distances, a time estimate, filament, tools, and speeds.
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Involute spur gears with a live meshing preview, contact ratio and undercut checks, and SVG/DXF export; gear-train search for any ratio; and length, centre distance, and speed for timing belts (GT2, HTD, T, MXL, XL, L), V-belts, and roller chain.
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Write OpenSCAD code and render it right in the page — the real OpenSCAD engine compiled to WebAssembly — with a 3D preview, a Customizer built from your parameter comments, BOSL2 and MCAD libraries on demand, and STL, 3MF, OBJ, OFF, AMF, SVG and DXF downloads.
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Hole and peg sizes for press, snug, sliding, and free fits by process (FDM, resin, SLS), slicer compensation fitted from a measured test print, a downloadable clearance test (STL and OpenSCAD), and hole sizes for heat-set inserts, screws, and nut traps.
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Open a 3D model to check its size, volume, surface area, and whether it is watertight; estimate print weight and cost; scale, rotate, mirror, or flip it; and export STL.
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Helical compression, extension, and torsion springs — rate, stresses with the Wahl and curvature factors, allowable stress from the wire's real strength, solid height, buckling, natural frequency, hook stress, arbor clearance, and coils for a target rate.
Project ·
My friends from the Amiga community, reimagined as Lemmings — designed with Meshy AI from photos, printed in PLA on Bambu printers, and finished with felt-tip pens and UV resin. Plus a few guesses at what Lemmings would be up to now.
Project update ·
How a conversation with Bill Borsari became a walk-through history of the Amiga at the Vintage Computer Festival. It was built almost entirely at my home, some 2,500 people came through, and we finished the day with the Amies.
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A walk-through history of the Amiga, built for its 40th anniversary at the Vintage Computer Festival at the Computer History Museum, with the Amies awards in the evening.
