Two more prints off the A1 Mini this week, both picked more for how they feel in the hand than how they look on a shelf.

First up is a fidget cube — small, and surprisingly satisfying to fiddle with. It’s easily become the thing I pick up and turn over without thinking while I’m reading or on a call.

The second is a Truchet tile pattern, generated from an SVG file rather than modelled by hand. Truchet tiles are simple square tiles with a repeating pattern on them — usually a pair of arcs or diagonal lines — that combine in interesting ways depending on how each tile is rotated when they’re laid out in a grid. Generating the layout as an SVG first meant I could experiment with the tiling arrangement in 2D before ever committing to a print.

After designing a case for my ESP32 WiFi scanner I’ve picked up some new parts to play with: a WeAct Studio ESP32-S3-N16R8 dev board — 16MB of flash and 8MB of PSRAM, dual USB-C, RGB status LED, sat in a little printed case I already had lying around — paired with a WeAct Studio 4.2 inch e-paper module, 400x300 resolution over a simple SPI header (GND, SDA, SCL, CS, D/C, RES, BUSY, VCC).

After designing my first shelf in TinkerCAD, I wanted a project that actually needed a proper enclosure rather than a mounting bracket. I’d been building a small self-contained WiFi scanner around this cheap ESP32 dev board — an ESP32 module with a built-in 1.14 inch LCD — paired with a small rechargeable battery, and it had been living on my desk as a loose tangle of board, wires and cells. Time to give it a case.

Following on from designing my own shelves and stands for prints off the A1 Mini, I’ve finally sat down and learned some proper CAD rather than just cobbling shapes together — first project is TinkerCAD, and the thing I picked to design is a shelf to hold my Unifi WiFi router.

It’s a simple, practical brief for a first go: something to mount the router flat and tidy rather than leaving it balanced wherever it’ll fit. TinkerCAD’s block-based approach made it an easy on-ramp — nothing like the intimidation of opening a full parametric CAD package for the first time — and it was enough to get a properly measured, functional design done in an evening.

Flickr album collecting prints off the Bambu Lab A1 Mini — a running photo dump alongside the write-ups, updated as new prints come off the bed.

A follow-up to my first impressions post on the Bambu Lab A1 Mini — I’ve moved past calibration cubes and benchies now, so here’s a look at the first useful things I’ve actually printed with it.

First up is a phone stand, printed in blue — one I designed myself. Nothing fancy, but it’s exactly the kind of small, practical thing that makes owning a printer worth it, and there’s something extra satisfying about it being your own design rather than someone else’s model. There’s now a permanent stand sat by the printer holding my phone up at a useful angle.

I’ve finally pulled the trigger on a 3D printer — a Bambu Lab A1 Mini. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time, years of watching other people’s prints show up online and thinking “I should really get one of those” before actually doing anything about it.

Went with the A1 Mini over the bigger models mainly for the price and the smaller footprint — it doesn’t take up much desk space, and it felt like a sensible way to dip a toe in without committing to a huge enclosed printer before I know how much I’ll actually use it.