A Bambu Labs 3D printer is shown printing a cube. The cube has a division between yellow and purple plastic running at an angle through the cube. The printer is printing the purple section, and the face on which it is printing is angled at nearly 40 degrees to the print bed.

Printing Smooth Upper Surfaces With A Non-Planar Slicer

November 15, 2026 by Aaron Beckendorf 4 Comments

One of the most tantalizing prospects for 3D printing has been non-planar printing, which promises smoother surfaces without a staircase pattern, reduced or eliminated support structures in some incarnations, and the possibility of greater strength in others. One of the biggest limits to its adoption has been the lack of non-planar slicer programs, a gap which [Zimeng Xiong] of [Alpaca Engineering] has worked to eliminate with the non-planar PancakeSlicer.

PancakeSlicer is designed to work with standard 3-axis printers (a Bambu Labs A1 Mini in this case), so the non-planar paths available to it are limited by the print head’s clearance on each side of the nozzle. In the case of the A1 Mini, this could be substantially improved by removing the cooling shroud from the print head, relying instead on a remote static cooling system (RSCS), which blows cooling air in from the sides of the print bed. Being meant for 3-axis printers, the main goal of PancakeSlicer is to print smooth top surfaces without a stair-step pattern.

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A LEGO 3D Printer

November 11, 2026 by Tyler August 11 Comments

LEGO building blocks are a great toy, but every so often a hacker decides to take the little bricks outside of the toy room and make them an integral part of a build. [Adam Turaj] took that idea further than most with his Studprint, a 3D printer that’s 92% LEGO.

We aren’t just talking LEGO bricks making up part of the frame here, or even the bed — though that’s obviously the case — but [Adam] goes so far that even the motion system is using LEGO leadscrews to drive the axes of this printer. Is it particularly capable? Well, no. He’s not boasting of a remarkable bed size or high speeds here because that’s really not the point. The point is that he made a printer in LEGO and if you don’t see the fun in that, we don’t know what to tell you.

The whole project is open source, and includes the CAD files for the handful of non-LEGO bits you’ll need to mount the electronics, steppers and such. With an unheated bed of ABS bricks, you’re going to be limited in filament choices, but [Adam] has at least made a Benchy, which is all anyone really needs, right?

In light of recent work, we might suggest that the printer is also a pick-and-place machine. If you want to turn the phrase “LEGO 3D Printer” around, we have seen 3D Printed LEGO before as well. We’d be remiss not to note that this isn’t the first printer to use the ubiquitous building blocks we’ve seen, though this one keeps with the regular filament and extruder rather than hot glue like the 2013 version.

Print & Place: Add Embedded Electronics While FDM Printing

November 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

Although combining electronics and 3D-printed structures is fairly common, this usually entails some level of manual assembly. This contrasts strongly with the Print & Place approach demonstrated by [Oliver Child] et al. in their research article titled Print & Place: Using a 3D printer for Continuous Assembly of Electronic Devices.

An accompanying video is also provided which covers all the basics and showing a few ways in which a regular FDM printer can be used without modifications to embed these components. Rather than requiring a custom tool head the thermoplastic is used as a temporary adhesive to pick up parts that are placed in a printed tray elsewhere on the build plate.

This parts tray is created parametrically before being printed. Following this an operator has to populate this tray with the requisite parts so that the print head can pick them up when they are needed. This is done during the printing of the actual parts, with regular G-code added to move the head over to the needed part before using a bit of extruded plastic to adhere to it and lift it to its new home.

Subsequently these parts can be printed over to fully embed them, with this method supporting a range of parts. In the three demonstrations everything from small pre-populated PCBs to strips of conductive wire and braid were used together with rivets to provide paths between conductive traces.

Of course, with this being an open loop system you can expect many of the typical issues here, ranging from pick failures, placement misalignment and contact inconsistencies, as the authors encountered during their experiments. Here one could conceivably pitch adding a camera system as on typical pick & place machines to add a feedback loop that the firmware could then use for adjustments and to signal the human operator to assist.

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RepRapMicron Uses Fibre Optics To Print Tiny Benchy In Resin

October 23, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

The 0.5 mm Benchy made with the MicroRepRap UV head.

The RepRapMicron (also µRepRap) is pretty much the microscopic take on what RepRap did for more macroscale manufacturing, with the most recent innovation being a UV print head, called the PIKA UV Head. What this does is use off-the-shelf optical fiber and UV LED modules to create 3D structures in-situ in a UV resin, allowing for pretty small structures to be printed, down to a resolution of about 9 µm.

More photos of prints can be found on the blog page with links to YouTube videos. It’s naturally somewhat tricky to get clean photographs of a 3D print that’s small enough to lose forever if you so much as sneeze or breathe too loudly.

For the UV head assembly a single mode fiber optical cable was used in the form of a regular patch cord that got trimmed a bit with a hacksaw. This was used in combination with a “3W” UV LED module, which may or may not be its true rating, but it was definitely able to cure the SLA resin. The used resin was regular eSun Standard Resin.

Afterwards you have to do the typical SLA post-processing, including cleaning off of liquid resin – both the part and fiber – and curing the part. So far results are pretty decent, with overhangs still being a weak spot that will be addressed in future revisions.

Knitting Yarn And Filament With FilaLoom

October 21, 2026 by Ian Bos 8 Comments

We don’t generally think of 3D printing and knitting in the same sentence. One uses threads and fine motor control, while the other requires great knowledge of pressing buttons and plastics. That said, they both entail stacking material over and over until a finished product emerges. So why not blend the two crafts together? [Joram de Haas] decided to work on just that in the form of FilaLoom.

This isn’t the first time we have seen additional elements embedded into 3D printed parts here on Hackaday. However, this particular implementation has some extra features which allow the embedded structures to grow larger than most examples prior. Instead of placing any implements directly into a structure by hand, all thread is placed by a tool head not so different from tool-changer printers. Using both the 3D printing tool head and the thread tool, some truly interesting properties can emerge from the finished product. If you aren’t interested in the weird webbing properties themselves, you surely could appreciate the possibilities demonstrated by the 3D knits.

You might not have a specific use case for thread printing, but why not check out some other fancy 3D printing techniques? Here’s a group of various design techniques that will certainly make you think twice in your next design!

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Disposing Of PLA And Why Composting Is Not An Option

October 16, 2026 by Maya Posch 29 Comments

The ‘biofriendly’ nature of poly(lactic acid) (PLA) filament often gets touted as one of its main advantages over alternatives like PETG, but even a modicum of research ought to inform a person that the biodegrading feature of PLA is only true for pure PLA without additives and at temperatures at or above its glass transition temperature (Tg). Thus the results of a year-long experiment by [I built a thing] shouldn’t be too surprising.

After burying said PLA in the garden like any self-respecting person does who tries to dispose of some evidence, the PLA suffered through a European winter and very hot, dry summer, before being dug up again recently for inspection and testing. Although not the first time that someone has tested this, it’s a good reminder considering just how much PLA filament is used each year.

In total three sample sets were used, one being the control, the other two buried in soil and compost respectively. A visual inspection showed no major difference, and a tensile strength test also showed no statistically significant change among all three sample sets. The experiment could have been concluded here, but instead calorimetry was used in a laboratory setting to see whether exposure to microbes as commonly found in soil does anything significant.

This isothermal microcalorimetry test was performed at the University of Basel, effectively to answer the question whether there’s anything in the PLA samples that can feed said microbes. As it turns out, the answer is a resounding ‘no’, with microbial activity within the presence of PLA dropping off even quicker presumably due to there being less volume available for nutrients.

When [I built a thing] contacted a large number of commercial biodegrading facilities in Switzerland, Germany and the USA, many would happily take PLA, but none of them would accepted 3D-printed PLA parts, which says a lot. The primary reason for this appears to be that even under industrial composting conditions it simply takes too long for these facilities to consider these to be economical to compost.

With PLA primarily degrading via hydrolysis, it needs to be exposed to the right conditions for this process to not take an eternity. You can of course use something like PHA instead, which doesn’t require this hydrolysis step to be biodegradable. Overall PLA is quite a crummy material, with it also suffering from embrittlement due to crystallization that will happily turn a spool of PLA into lots of sad fragments. This makes PETG into a very common and very attractive alternative to PLA.

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Rendering 3D Prints From G-Code

October 14, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 22 Comments

Your CAD software generally has some rudimentary tools for rending images of your parts, from simply-textured models to more photo-realistic options. However, those renders are of the geometry you created—not how that geometry would look after it was sent to a 3D printer. Extrudio is a tool that aims to create more realistic renders for 3D printed parts.

Rather than rendering from the geometry of your model, such as by using an STL file, Extrudio uses G-Code instead. It creates its render based on the instructions your 3D printer uses to produce your part, sweeping a virtual bead of plastic along the toolpaths in the code. In doing so, it can realistically display layer lines in a 3D print and other artifacts of the printing process, like stair-stepping on spheres and curves. It can display the render in various contexts, from blank studio backgrounds to a number of “sets” like a bench or kitchen.

The tool’s website notes that this could be useful for generating images for those selling 3D printed parts online, though obviously the realism of actually printing and photographing a part would still be superior. Still, it could prove a useful tool for quickly pitching realistic images of a 3D printed part, particularly if it’s desirable to model different colors or print techniques without putting in the hours to actually produce them.

We’ve featured some other great 3D printing hacks lately, like this nifty trick for doing overhangs without supports.

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