3D Printing

All 3D Printed Parts Served to You on a Silver Build Plate

Here’s a useful tool for all of you 3D printer users out there! When 3D printing multiple parts in a single build, it can be a real pain in the extruder to lay them out to maximize your printbed. Grégoire Passault, a doctoral student at LaBRI in France, has written an open source software to enable users to more quickly and efficiently lay out the components for their multipart print job.

3D printing plater app

Plater allows users to group all of the parts for a multipart object onto any given build platform.  First, a user selects all of the .stl files for a given object to be printed in a single build.  Afterwards, the quantity and orientation of the pieces is decided by the user, which is ideal for jobs with a lot of duplicate pieces, like the 22-part, 4-legged robot Passault built.  Passault points out that, “Plater will not choose the best orientation of a part for you, this is up to the user because it depends on a lot of things.” After orienting your pieces, you can outline the dimensions of your printbed and, voila, Plater lays out all of your pieces into a single job.  You can see Plater at work in the video below:

You can download this neat, little tool on GitHub. Have fun!