The Arduino has long been a staple of the maker community. Longer than 3D printing has been as popular as it is, in fact. So, with both being mainstream, I decided to marry the two together to make my life a little easier.
These three 3D printing projects are far from the only prints I’ll do on my Arduino journey, I’m sure. I’m already looking for the next prints to do, and even working on making some of my own. But, the three prints below I think are essential for anyone getting started with microcontrollers—they’re invaluable to me.
- Build Volume
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180x180x180
- Printing Speed
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500mm/s
The Bambu Lab A1 mini 3D printer is ready to go out of the box and can have you printing within 30 minutes. Offering full-auto calibration, this compact 3D printer features a 180mm build volume and is compatible with the AMS Lite for multi-color printing. It also features built-in vibration and flow-rate calibration, which are typically features only found on more premium printers.
A jumper wire organizer
Unlike others at How-To Geek, I’ll admit that I’m not always the most neat and tidy guy when it comes to cables and cords (though I want to be)—but that has to be different when it comes to Arduino projects. Why does it matter? If I go to grab some jumper wires, and they’re all jumbled together, it makes it difficult to find similar lengths. When this happens, I know that I’m very likely to just give up on the project before I start, and I don’t want to do that.
I’ve really been enjoying doing Arduino projects over the past week. While I’m relatively new to microcontroller projects, I’m picking it up fast and finding a lot of joy in it. Plus, with the help of AI, problems that used to take hours or days to solve can be fixed in minutes.
To help with that, I printed some jumper wire organizers. I’ll be re-arranging how I have my jumper wires organized a bit as I make more projects and learn what I do and don’t use as often, but for now, this is a fantastic solution. It lets me easily see all the colors, pick from just one, and also see how many I have.
I need this level of organization for my resistors, LEDs, and other components, I just haven’t found out the best way to do it yet. Either way, I’m very excited about having this jumper wire organizer, and it definitely makes my Arduino projects much easier.
Print-in-place PCB clamp
While my Arduino itself requires little soldering, the extra components that I plan to use will require quite a bit of soldering. As I write this, I have some ESP32-S3 modules out for delivery—with no headers soldered on. When they arrive, I’ll have to dig out my soldering iron and start soldering headers on.
This could be a headache, but with these print-in-place PCB clamps, I can have the ESP32 modules suspended midair while I solder the headers on. These clamps also make it easy to work with all other types of PCBs that you need two hands to work with.
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As a simple print-in-place functional model, I was very happy with how these clamps turned out. Plus, they’re quite cheap to print, requiring just 9g of filament per clamp, which costs only $0.25 with the black PLA filament that I use with my 3D printer. So, I can print four for just $1 and only 90 minutes of time.
Print-in-place wire holder for soldering
Along the same lines as soldering PCBs, I’m sure that I’ll have to solder a lot of wires. I hate soldering wires. I’ve long wanted one of those articulating soldering helper arm systems, but I’m too cheap to buy one. I never even thought of 3D printing a set until I got my Arduino.
The wire holder that I chose is a pretty simple system. There’s no articulating arms, and it just attaches together like a puzzle, making it both easy to print and easy to use. Eventually, I plan to print one of the articulating arm systems to have more flexibility in positioning, but it’s not entirely necessary right now.
I’m happy with how this 3D print came out, and I think it’ll be used quite often, thought maybe not always for its intended purpose. I can definitely see myself using it to hold a microcontroller or a component in one arm and the wire in the other arm.
The Bambu Labs Black Friday sale makes me wish I had waited to buy a 3D printer
They’re priced how low?!
If you’ve not dove into the Arduino world yet, then the new Arduino Starter Kit R4 is exactly where you should start. I picked up a similar kit on Amazon to begin my Arduino journey, but the official kit comes with a nice book to explain the projects that you can flip through.
The best part about the just-announced Arduino Starter Kit R4 is that you get the latest UNO R4 Wifi board, which includes an ESP32 chip and a 96 LED matrix display for building projects that were never before possible on Arduino.