Occasionally I am asked: How often and for what do you use the 3D printer? 

I use it quite often. My informed guess is that it happens about twice per week or even, on occasion, more often. Based on the need to print something and based on free time, I can invest into the printing related activities. What do I mean by that? The act of the printing is something at the end of the process. At the beginning there is an idea or the mentioned need to print something. Quite often it is something broken by our two young boys. 

In this given case I printed a part which was missing on the ambulance car which Adámek had found next to the plastic waste bin. He likes cars. And he wasn’t able to let the ambulance to be scrapped and took it home. So I printed the back door and changed the battery and now the car looks quite new.

Or another case. We have an Alexa Wall-clock but we do not want to have it mounted on any wall. For some time the rounded clock was freely rolling on the window parapet and finally I decided to make a stand for it. It was quite an easy job to draw the stand using my favourite tool – Fusion 360 – and the result is not bad.

I have many other cases where the printer helped us. 

And till now I am speaking only about projects I made from scratch. Fortunately there are models available for download on the internet and all you need is to find, download and print the right model.

But I have much more fun by designing the things I am then printing. I consider the ability to design at least simple objects important to have a long term fun with the 3D printer.

And this is how it looks like when my two big technology hobbies meet each other. Printed case for Raspberry Pi + SSD disk – my Lightning node…