https://www.printables.com/model/57813-boxkit-parts-for-maki...
3d printing is great, but a lot of wasted plastic if you print large organizers and stuff like that.
I think maybe I've been on fark too long. https://m.fark.com/comments/6611712/Woman-discovers-boyfrien...
You don't have to be Adrian Monk to recognize that toilets are unsanitary.
And fwiw, I don't really care either wherever people use them for whatever they want, I am just still confused why people would want to use paper (sourced from leftover toilet utensils), which is notorious for being basically un-cleanable... as food storage, but to each their own.
I'm surprised how many people hate me for such (imo) mellow statement though
I don't really think anyone other than OCD/germaphobes thinks about toilet paper rolls in that way and it's certainly not "notorious". I'm pretty sure the general sentiment is that it's a perfectly benign material, often given to kids to play and craft with.
The same thing happened with that episode of mythbusters about the toilet ploom from flushing. A bunch of OCD/germaphobes lost their minds and have not stopped thinking about it since. Meanwhile the rest of society gave a collective shrug and couldn't even be bothered to move their toothbrush brush to another room or close the toilet lid while flushing.
But I don’t think most people are using gridfinity as food storage.
But the article/video we're commenting on doesn't do so, so that's fair I guess?
This would be true even if the materials were food safe to be honest, I don't see how you can keep something like this clean.
It's for storing stuff like capacitors and screws and electrical tape.
It's just a black hole that I choose not to get into by not printing stuff that's expected to be in contact with food.
If this is a problem, you should buy a new printer that actually keeps the filament conduits away from the hotend. This is a health hazard regardless of food safety - decomposed PTFE is nasty stuff to breathe in.
> Or the trace remains of charred ASA/ABS I printed last week through the same nozzle...
Fair enough, but I would also say that you should be purging old filament anyways before starting a new one. My slicer does this by default.
> Or in fact any of the various coatings of the heated bed or leftover trace amounts of previous prints...
These days, heated beds are covered in PEI. That's food-safe too.
I think your take is a little panicky and not supported by the evidence. It is perfectly fine to print single-use food stuff out of PLA, especially if you just have a roll or two of the pure (undyed) stuff around. You're much more likely to get sick from the food itself than the plastic it touched for a little while, and PLA is relatively biodegradable compared to most other plastic foodware.
The filament is still in contact with the PTFE tube, the PTFE tube is also hand-cut by me and in motion with the head so it undergoes wear. Even when you get an all-metal hotend there are ways of contamination by PTFE passing through the hot-end and degrading into harmful chemicals.
> purging old filament anyways before starting a new one. My slicer does this by default.
I do purge and cold-pull. While this removes the bulk of the old filament it does not remove all trace amounts of it.
> These days, heated beds are covered in PEI. That's food-safe too.
It is food-safe only if it was produced in a food-safe manner and was kept food safe afterwards, including no contact with pollutants.
Since you mention evidence, I have no way of proving that anything I produce is food-safe. Literally not anything in my extrusion path is certified food-safe, let alone I have equipment to test.
The fact of the matter is that glass, ceramic, and stainless steel has replaced any vessels that are in contact with food at home, and I don't intend to look back on that, and I am in fact looking to replace anything in regular contact with human skin with non-synthetic/non-plastic alternatives -- this includes clothes, bed sheets and others.
While there is the hacking mindset, people also need to be responsible, and my red lines on that is making stuff with a safety aspect to it. Food safety is safety as much as fire and electrical safety in my book.
There are food safe coatings though, these deal with the problem by making your 3D print not in contact with food.
[0] https://www.artresin.com/blogs/artresin/food-safe-epoxy-a-gu...
Even so, if you want to be perfectly safe then apply a coat of polyurethane varnish and let it fully cure. That will seal any holes or voids where bacteria might grow, insulated from cleaning solutions.
https://reddit.com/r/3dprinting_pha is a start.
Because some of us have like 200 cables, and toilet paper rolls is a cheap but effective way of getting some control over these :) And besides, I'm sure that my fingers and feet are more dirty when I touch/move any of the cables, than the toilet paper rolls that spent a couple of days in a bathroom.
In my household with 3 adults, we go through maybe a roll every 2 weeks or so. It's almost exclusively used for number 2 business though, so maybe that accounts for some of that difference.
Or, we just use very different types of paper, and yours require more of it for the same effect. :)
You may suggest whatever you want :) We do have an installed bidet in our main bathroom, as most houses where I live has those. Tried it, didn't like it, will proceed with using paper as currently it doesn't have many drawbacks and doesn't leave me feeling "more dirty" afterwards than using water would.
Another improvement may be to make the top and bottom pieces stackable along with the snapping grid system compatibility.
I wish he’d write books.
Highly recommended: https://m.youtube.com/@ZackFreedman
You mean, always amazingly augmented, aspiring to alienate all other audible aspirations? Zach is always a treat.
https://www.reddit.com/r/honeycombwall/
Although they aren't open-source as Gridfinity or HSW:
Cargo modular storage system by Play Conveyor: https://thangs.com/designer/Play%20Conveyor/3d-model/Cargo%2...
Multiboard, by Multiboard: https://www.multiboard.io/
Her Discord is also quite active with people interested in the space, and Underware (under the desk cable management system), Neogrid and Deskware are all storage systems that have came out of her community.
HSW 100%
Licensing in the 3D printing community tends to be a mess, with licenses that are often absurd, and selectively and sometimes dramatically enforced and unenforced. Multiboard is one of the most absurd I've seen, and is so utterly toxic I feel like touching anything involved with it would be risky: I'd really encourage people to read it [1] (and not the misleading summary they give). I suppose by even writing this I'm making myself ineligible for the license, as the license would not allow me to act in any way contrary to the interests of the company behind Multiboard, or even encourage any third part to act contrary to those interests. If the terms aren't absurd enough, there's a clause for the company to terminate the already limited ability to make and use derivative works if they feel you are taking advantage of the license terms.
Yet at the same time, go to any 3D printing model website, and you'll see numerous obvious copyright and trademark violations of Multiboard, often under completely incompatible licenses. Not only are these not removed (I have reported them before), but the owners of Multiboard will even officially comment on the sites praising the designs.
It's bizarre, but despite things at times going dramatically wrong, like with Benchy's license suddenly being enforced after many years of encouraging violations, people in the community largely seem to ignore the problem.
[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1C0-Iyxydqk_d2I3o_5ua...
The way they play with "Designed Works" and "commercial use" is really pretty weird. I kinda understand the aim - it's just one guy who's probably trying to make a startup out of this and is kinda hedging his bases against someone coming up with an injection moulded copy on Aliexpress. But the way "commercial use" is left vague is pretty sketchy. Is e.g. "background of an office in a youtube video" considered "commercial use"?
That being said, I guess I'll still finish at least one wall with it. I've used a few pegboards over the years and in my experience, these things don't die on licensing. They die on the fact that the manufacturer stops making them / switches to a different size / type. Here I can at least save the STLs and reprint the stuff as needed.
Until the license is revoked, changed, or you ever do some for profit work from the space where the multiboard exists. Multiboard legally owns the objects you printed on your printer with filament you paid for, so you will still be a pirate!
Multiboard is supposedly HSW compatible though so consider only printing HSW parts so you are not locked into their doomed ecosystem.
I think the license is a negative but I also don’t think it’s going to impact end users in any way that would make me worry about using it.
It’s not like I’m dedicating myself to a software ecosystem or something complex like that. If the license somehow becomes a problem, at the end of the day it’s just a pegboard that I printed for under $20 worth of material. I can just make a new one.
However personally, I've also been a fan of IKEA Skadis boards, as it's quite easy to get up and running in terms of a baseplate + there are already a lot of models for it out there.
I had one in my office for years and no one could hear it on the other side of video calls.
Re size, the bambu A1 with the AMS lite takes up quite a bit of space - but the option of not having to switch filaments and not having to worry about filament running out mid print is sooo nice.
On that basis, a DIY/roll-your-own solution became far more attractive.
- no waiting on shipping
- no worry about whether or no there is an SKU which meets my needs (I had to modify the 10-tray compartments into 5-tray front--back organizers for endmills)
The thing which finally pushed me over was the development of a matching Systainer system:
https://old.reddit.com/r/gridfinity/comments/1lnkt93/wip_upd...
which hopefully will be ready by the time my order of a new/larger 3D printer than my current (tiny) Ordbot Quantum arrives.
https://www.mysortimo.us/en_US/Storage-Bins-%26-Boxes/T-BOXX...
... and although the insert colors changed, the architecture and sizing has been constant for more than 15 years ...
Meanwhile, among others, I've placed alerts for their L-Boxx Mini, so I buy a couple of them each time they go €8 or less. (Less than 8 is unusual, but around 8 is possible)
https://gridfinity.perplexinglabs.com/
Outside of gridfinity it can be used to generate odd-sized grids via the GRIPS option, make HSW honeycomb walls, and supports multiboard, and a few others.
There is kind of a solution to this where you can use non standard grid sizes to perfectly fit your draws, and there are generators which will create the baseplates and bins for you. But you lose the ability to use other people’s models.
Feel like it would have been better if they had picked a smaller grid size so the average wasted space would be smaller.
Don't get me wrong, Gridfinity looks amazing. But, cutting a few cardboard base plates from old shipping boxes into place and putting together little stands for a metronome, tuner and a few other small things, as well as a bunch of boxes for plecs and other small stuff took like half an hour to an hour.
And I could reuse some trash shipping boxes I had around here.
He did get a new Nylon FDM machine and a few other things, but he isn't so much a software design person. Mr. Savage has a huge bias towards using their hands to solve their problems and I wouldn't take his work style as a referendum on the utility of these other tools.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWXcnVTY3pk
Foam Core is still cool tho
I think Gridfinity is more geared toward people looking for a hobby than a practical storage solution. Which it totally fine - people are definitely creating some cool stuff with Gridfinity - but probably good to decide up front which group you fall into.
Impossibly ambitious cleanup campaigns are like catnip to ADHD haversThough the plus side to this is that it can be done somewhat inrementally
I've also sought treatment for OCD. It doesn't give me any kind of "organizing superpower", it just makes we want to wash my hands after touching things.
While I like organising warehouse sized spaces down to separating out screws by thread type I also enjoying taking a bowling ball to Jenga towers. I believe that's classed as OC/DC.
3D printing with a modern printer is set and forget. You send the print file to the printer and you go get it a couple hours later.
Still faster than waiting for a package from Amazon and lower resource usage than driving to the store.
The customization comes everywhere from picking the bin you want to selecting the color filament to match your layout. Gridfinity isn’t my thing but people who are into it are usually customizing something, from the color to the baseplate.
However, for initial setup of the system (e.g. filling up multiple drawers with baseplates and basic bins, as you will see in many videos online), it would definitely jump start the process a lot, where you'll otherwise spend weeks printing everything. Additionally, if you also go for the fancier baseplates/bins that include the magnets you'll also spend quite a bit of time on assembly and will require external hardware anyways.
I personally didn't think it was a big deal as for me adopting the system incrementally over time worked quite well, but I think there definitely is a niche of people (and possibly businesses) that would like to adopt Gridfinity for its other benefits and appreciate faster initial setup time.
https://gridfinity.perplexinglabs.com/
Ironically printing custom pelican inserts with this right now
You wouldn't download "Hello world"?
Consumer-grade containers would be cheaper than 3d printing if buying a set, it'd get folk up-and-running without fuss, and when they wanted to customize it they could do so with the help of any of their 3d printing fanatic buddies.
So yeah. I agree with @stephenpetryk. Storage solution companies should start marking their bins as Gridfinity-compatible (which is a protected use of copyright regardless of whether "Gridfinity" is copyrighted).
The cool things about gridfinity is not just the custom pieces, but also the exact fit that can be achieved. Since every drawer seems to be a slightly different size, exact fits with basic bins would never quite be achieved without targeting a specific drawer.
Also, I've turned down the fill and structural strength a lot without issues for most things. How strong does a bin for cotton swabs need to be?
Let people make some money while everyone is saving money.
https://x.com/zackfreedman/status/1650629770156326912#m
or for those allergic to X:
https://lightbrd.com/zackfreedman/status/1650629770156326912...
Basically, it seems like the inventor purports to be licensing the kinds of exclusive rights to their invention that a patent would grant them, but without actually meeting the legal requirements for receiving a patent.
(I don't know of any other jurisdiction that would give them a cause of action either, but law is diverse enough, and many governments are corrupt enough, that I'm sure there's somewhere in the world they could win a lawsuit.)
Maybe some actual lawyers could chime in on this.
> Let people make some money
Why would people who did nothing to invent and develop the system would get the money and not the creators ?
Also seems like a great way to add +50% plastic volume to everything you own. Incidentally, I've found the cardboard boxes that 3D printer filament comes in to be an excellent basis for general storage.
There is also a plugin for Fusion 360 which allows customizing a lot of items that can go into the grid.
I do work on my shop, but only so far as it furthers my hobbies.
As far as gridfinity goes, it's really nice to have the right size and amount of storage for everything. Imagine those inserts people buy for cutlery for a drawer in the kitchen. There is always a gap on the side for something to fall into. There is only a slot for all knives. No place at all for corn on the cob holders.
Now imagine this same problem for building models where a person may have 200+ different items in different amounts. Previously people used things like tackle boxes from fishing, or one of those plastic cases for holding screws. But they never quite line up.
Also, 3d printing is very much an asynchronous kind of thing. You work on your shop by pushing a button and get results an hour later. It's not woodworking where you spend 80 hours building your bench, then the next 500 hours building all the parts for it.
Making a custom enclosure for every tool seems over optimized and wasteful. If I were to attempt this, it would take decades and I'd never see a return on productivity within my lifetime.
(and for the Europeans/Rest of the World, there's an A4 configuration option)
Also, there is an extension for freecad to make non rectangular (e.g. "p") shaped bins.
Most satisfying, least productive things I've done this year!
Then, in your CAD program, set up the photos as backgrounds for different perspective views.
Or, obviously, get a 3D scanner and live with the point cloud mesh approximations, it’s probably less of a hassle.
Or… just get a good set of calipers and a radius measuring tool.
Adam Savage’s guide to vacuum forming https://youtube.com/watch?v=lTy8tsZzT_Q&pp=ygUaYWRhbSBzYXZhZ...
First page I could find for the diy stormtrooper costume process https://www.studiocreations.com/howto/stormtrooper/index.htm...
There are 3d model search engines where I recommend just entering [item name] + gridfinity to find pre existing models. There is: yeggi.com and thangs.com (be aware that the latter recently changed to only display models from its own domain by default).
Between Honeycomb Storage Wall and Gridfinity almost every tool I own has a home.
The CAD plugin in Blender is my favorite though. Need a caliper to get measurements and then I can build out my hooks/clamps/whatever. FreeCAD for when I just need sketches as I find the solid part workflow utterly confusing, whereas I'm very well versed in Blender.
The trick is a hybrid approach, use photogrammetry to get a draft model into whatever environment you use (like Blender or whatever), then use that for creating the high-quality cutout manually, which will be very easy with a in-place 3D draft model right in the scene.
Blender can import an SVG; then you can clean up the curve if necessary.
1. Draw the outline of the tool in question on A4 paper
2. Scan it
3. Trace it on Blender, extrude, boolean
4. Print
Of course, only works for small enough tools. Maybe use more A4 sheets?
I've been able to print baseplates that fit precisely inside different drawers, add magnets, etc.
I guess they assume anyone hitting the site already knows this.
When I read 'grid' and 'storage' on HN, I think of other stuff.
Kudos to all gridfinity makers out there.
Great in its own right though