Honeycomb Wall

Things to hang on your Honeycomb Storage Wall, made to your own measurements.

• Hooks and hangers on the Honeycomb Wall page: any reach, any tip, one prong or two (a fork for cables, headphones, a bag).
• Shelves and bins any width, depth and height, with dividers and a square, scoop or sloped front. The plugs land on the right cells by themselves.
• Tool holders: a row of holes for screwdrivers and hex keys, keyholes a cable snaps into, or open slots for pliers. And a magnet insert for knives and bits.
• The same plug as the original, measured from RostaP’s shelves: everything prints upright with no supports and pushes into a hook-socket insert.
• Straight edges: tick top, bottom, left or right on a panel and its zigzag edge is filled in square, for a wall with a neat rectangular frame. Inserts can have the socket turned 30° for a wall hung the other way, and a double can mix two middles (a wall screw beside a hook socket).

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Panels and click-in inserts for the Honeycomb Storage Wall — the hexagon pegboard everyone is printing.

• New: Honeycomb Wall (menu: Tools → Designers & generators). Wall panels sized to fill your printer’s bed, with the honeycomb edge, so they sit edge to edge with each other and with RostaP’s.
• Inserts that click in: a hook socket, M3, M4 and M5 nut inserts for screwing holders on, a countersunk wall-screw insert for hanging the wall, a blank — and doubles that bridge two cells.
• Measured from the original and checked against it, so they fit the hundreds of hooks and holders already made for it. Free with a free account; the design is RostaP’s (CC BY-NC), so they are for your own use.

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A lithophane in full colour, for a printer with four filaments — a Bambu Lab AMS, a Creality CFS or a Prusa MMU.

• New: Colour lithophane (CMYK) (menu: Lithophane → Colour (CMYK)). Thin cyan, magenta and yellow layers at the front tint a white lithophane behind them, so the photo lights up in its own colours. Pick a photo, see it lit in colour, and download.
• One file, ready to print. A 3MF for Bambu Studio, OrcaSlicer, Creality Print or PrusaSlicer, with each colour already its own part on its own filament and the lithophane settings set — or a ZIP of STLs, one per filament, for any slicer.
• Your filaments. Presets for Bambu Lab’s CMYK lithophane bundle and for Creality’s colours, every colour editable, each on the filament slot you choose — and a strength setting per colour to tune it after a test print. 144 × 108 mm in one click, to fit Bambu Lab’s lithophane frame.

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Turn any model into a print-in-place articulated one — a flexi snake, a dragon, a robot arm — then bend it on screen and check nothing collides before you print.

• New: articulate a model. In the 3D Designer, select a part and open Create → Articulate. Along the body cuts it into hinged segments that print in one piece and come off the printer already moving — the flexi animals everyone loves, from your own model. It looks at every cut first and tells you if a spot is too thin.
• Add a joint where you click. Choose One joint where I click, then click an elbow, a knee or a neck: only that limb moves (the blue cylinder shows which part). Do it again on any segment for as many joints as you like.
• Five kinds of joint. A hinge that bends side to side (its pin stands upright, so it prints best), a hinge that bends up and down, a ball and socket that bends any way, a swivel that twists — and a flexi link with no pin at all: a knob held by claws through the whole thickness, for thin, flat models only a few millimetres thick. The clearance comes from your printer fingerprint when you have one.
• Bend it. Create → Articulate → Bend it moves the joints on screen — all at once or one at a time, holding any piece still — makes it Wiggle, and Check fit finds any two pieces that would collide in that pose. Done puts it back straight, ready to print.
• New: Demos → Articulated demos. A flexi snake, every kind of joint side by side, a robot arm with a gripper, a flexi dragon with legs that swing and a flat lizard only 5 mm thick — open one and try Bend it.
• Lighter, faster cuts everywhere. Combining and cutting parts in the 3D Designer now keeps far fewer triangles — an articulated dragon went from about 190,000 to 35,000 — so files are smaller, exports quicker and Check fit several times faster. The shapes are exactly the same.

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Ring gears, racks, GT2 pulleys and belts, print-in-place bearings, hinges and chains, springs, captive nuts, planetary sets, gears that fit the ones you already made, turning them on screen, and every made part can be changed later.

• Change a part after you made it. In the 3D Designer, click a gear, a parametric part (box and lid, hinge, jar…), a loft, a thread, 3D text, a QR shape or a keychain, and press Edit … settings at the top of the Selected panel on the right. Its panel opens with the settings it was made with; change what you like and press Update, and it is rebuilt where it is — same place, turn, colour and name, and one Undo puts it back. Saved designs remember the settings too.
• New: ring gears. In the 3D Designer, open Create → Gear on the tool rail down the left and pick a Type: a normal Gear, a Ring — teeth inside (a gear runs round inside it, as in a planetary gearbox or a turntable drive), or a Ring — teeth outside (a big gear with an open middle). Rim sets how thick the solid band behind the teeth is.
• New: gear calculator. Create → Gears → Gear calculator: type the ratio you need — or a motor speed and the speed you want — and it finds the best gear trains: one to three stages of gears, a worm drive, or a planetary set, exact where it can be. Press Build and the whole train appears in the designer, meshed and ready to turn. It also works out gear sizes and the speed and torque at the output.
• New: Demos menu. Demos → Gear demos in the 3D Designer shows sixteen ready-made gear designs — from a simple pair to every gear type in one machine — each with a picture and Open in designer. Open one, press Turn the gears and see it work, then change anything you like.
• New: worm drives. In Create → Gears, make a worm — 1, 2 or 3 thread lines — then select it and Match selected gear to get its worm wheel, slanted to follow the thread and placed meshed. Huge reductions in one step (a 30-tooth wheel is 30 : 1), and a single-start worm locks itself. A worm or bevel gear combined with a shaft or crank handle keeps turning in Turn the gears. New demos: worm drives, a 1 : 640 worm tower with a twin-worm turntable, and one machine with every gear type connected.
• New: bevel and miter gears. In Create → Gears, pick Bevel / miter for cone-shaped gears that turn a drive through 90° — a miter pair at 1 : 1, or any ratio up to about 1 : 4.7. Match selected gear makes the partner and lays it on its side, meshed. Turn the gears spins them with the rest of your gears and checks every bevel pair in 3D. Two new demo files: a set of bevel pairs, and a four-way splitter driving four outputs from one crank.
• New: helical and herringbone gears. Every gear tool now has a Helix° setting that slants the teeth — quieter and stronger than straight teeth — and Herringbone, which slants them one way and back, so the gears don’t push sideways and print without supports. Match selected gear picks the hand that meshes, rings, racks and planetary sets included. All the gear tools are now together under Create → Gears. Two new demo files show them off — one is a herringbone gear bearing that prints in one piece already turning, beside a 1:27 gear tower. Turn the gears now turns every separate mechanism in a design at once.
• New: find your printer’s fit. Create → Clearance test makes a strip of holes from 0.1 to 0.5 mm bigger than a pin, each labelled, and the pin to try in them. Print it, pick the first hole the pin slides into and press Save to my fingerprint. From then on the designer fills in its gaps for you — joints, fits, gears, print-in-place parts, box lids and screw-hole allowance — from your printer fingerprint.
• New: electronics enclosures. Open Create → Electronics enclosure on the tool rail, pick your board — Arduino Uno or Nano, Raspberry Pi 4 or Zero, ESP32, or type your own size — and you get a box and a lid that fit it: the board on standoffs at its mounting holes, openings for its USB, HDMI and other connectors, and a press-fit or screw-on lid with vents. Mounting tabs are optional.
• New: knobs and thumb screws. Open Create → Knob / thumb screw on the tool rail. Pick a grip — fluted, star, fine knurl or smooth — the size and how it fixes on: a pocket underneath for a nut, a pocket on top for a bolt head (press a bolt in and you have a thumb screw), a bore for a shaft with a set-screw hole, or a printed threaded stem in one piece. The nut and bolt sizes fill in by themselves, M3 to M8.
• Gears that fit each other. Click a gear you have made, open Create → Gear and press Match selected gear: the new gear — or ring — gets teeth the same size, with a little Gap so printed gears turn freely, and it is placed already meshed: round it, inside it or beside it. Change the number of teeth and it stays matched.
• More screw holes. Combine → Screw hole now makes a captive nut slot — a nut buried inside the part with a slot to slide it in from the side, so it can’t turn or fall out — and bolt + nut in one click: a counterbore for the bolt head where you click and a hex nut trap on the far side. Heat-set insert holes get a small lead-in so the insert starts straight.
• New: springs. Open Create → Spring on the tool rail. A compression spring is a coil of square or round wire with closed, flat-ground ends — set the diameter, wire, coils and length, and it tells you how far it can squeeze — and a flat spring is a zig-zag strip that prints flat, with optional screw tabs at the ends.
• New: print-in-place parts. Open Create → Print-in-place on the tool rail for parts that come off the printer already moving, printed in one go: a ball bearing (rings and balls in a 45° groove), a hinge (two leaves round a built-in pin, with screw holes) or a chain (links tilted so they print without support). Clearance sets the gap that keeps the moving parts apart — 0.3–0.5 mm suits most printers.
• New: GT2 pulleys, belts and belt clamps. Open Create → GT2 pulley, belt & clamp on the tool rail. Make a timing pulley for a GT2 belt — any number of teeth, 6, 9 or 10 mm belt, flanges, a hub with a set-screw hole and a round or D-shaped bore for a motor shaft. Select two pulleys and pick Belt to put a belt round them: it tells you the belt length in teeth and can nudge a pulley so a standard closed belt fits. Belt clamp makes a clamp that grips the end of a belt, with a cover and two M3 screw holes. Turn the gears turns belted pulleys together.
• New: rack and pinion. In Create → Gear, pick the Type Rack (straight): a straight toothed bar for sliders, drawers, linear drives and toys. Select a gear first and press Match selected gear, and the rack gets the same teeth and is placed under it, meshed — or select a rack and match a gear to put one on top of it. Turn the gears slides the rack as the gear turns, and turns back at its ends.
• New: planetary gear sets. Open Create → Planetary gear set on the tool rail, choose the teeth on the sun and the planets, how many planets and the tooth size, and you get the whole set in one go: the sun, the planets and a ring that fits them all, spaced so every planet meshes — plus a carrier plate with a pin for each planet, printed beside it. The panel shows the gear ratio and the size, and warns if the planets would touch.
• Turn the gears before you print them. Open Create → Turn the gears on the tool rail and every gear that touches another turns with it, at the right speed and the right way round — a gear inside a ring too. If two gears would hit, they glow red with a marker where. Check fit steps them through every tooth and tells you the smallest gap, or exactly where they collide. Gears joined by a shaft — combined or grouped into one part, or stacked on one axis — turn together as one. Done puts everything back as it was.