Getting Ready

Supplies

1.) 3D Printer

2.) Digital Files, Purchase files, or try it out risk free with our test kit <LINK TO TEST KIT>

3.) Filament

That's it! Nothing else is required, Nodes is designed to be fully 3D printed and have no 3rd party parts!

Plan the build, figure out what you want to do.

Image: Plan + part numbers

We're sure you got it right the first time, but you know what they say, measure twice, print once! Even we get fooled from time to time, as there can be a lot of different parts required in your build.

Compile a list of all the different pieces you'll need, and the quantity of each.

To make sure you've got the correct parts mapped up to your build, check out our offiical part list guide here <LINK TO PART LIST GUIDE>

Using your part list, download the necessary files from our website.

Nodes is quite a large system, so we don't sell all of the files in one kit (or else it would be super expensive). Instead, we sell a base kits here <LINK TO BASE KIT> which have all the essential pieces, and then you can buy individual pieces to fit your build for a very small cost over on Thangs <Link to Thangs>.

Materials are one of the most important choices you'll make. The reason for this is that it will determine

1.) How much the structure will cost

2.) How long the structure will take to print

3.) How strong the structure will be (there are other ways to increase strength, but materials is a great starting point)

4.) How long your structure will last

5.) What environment your structure is designed for.

We've put together a ducking awesome materials guide here <link to materials guide>.

And of course you'll want to know what colors to use! We've put together that guide here <LINK TO COLOR GUIDE>

We've got some premade printing profiles to get you started here <Link to printing profiles> and some best practices here <link to printing best practices>.

These are living guides, and will be updated as we learn more. There really meant to be a starting point for you on your journey, and are the settings and practices that we use on a daily basis.

Image: Stuff printing

3D Printing has become easier than ever! However, that doesn't mean that it's be any means easy. I think we'd all love to live on a world where we can just beep boop the buttons, and boom, a perfect print. Unfortunetly that is just not the current situation of the 3D Printing market. Bambu Labs has taken enormous steps towards I process I call "Distributed Manufacturing" where instead of having a diverse global supply chain, you just manufactur what you want directly in your home, all you need is filament, a 3d printer, and a design file.

To help you on your journey, we've provided printing profiles for our officially supported materials. These materials are ones that we synergize best with our design philosophy and principles of Nodes.

You can find all of our printing profiles here: <link to printing guide>

Nodes is officially supported on all Bambu Labs printers.

IMAGE: Officially supported printers

IMAGE: Officially supported filaments

Image: Lots of parts and partially assembled structure.

Nodes is designed for a toolless assembly and to be assembled incredible fast and easily.

All you have to do is line the connectors up and press!

This is the most basic philosophy of this though, there are some general guidelines you want to follow when assembling nodes to ensure that your structure is as stable as possible.

We recommend building in panels, and then assembling those panels. You can start by laying nodes down and creating long flat planes on the ground. Take care, try to ensure that all of the connection points of the inner modules are overlapped by those of an outer module as your layer it up. This ensures that these structural weakpoints are covered, and that your panel will not have any weakpoints. One approach is to lay everything out, and slightly snap it into place. Build out the entire panel this way, so that all the pieces are in the right place, but not fully connected. Then, just put a towel on it and walk over it! Pressing down to ensure that everything snaps into place. Or you can use our mallet to smack the pieces into place. We recommend a nice tap with the mallet, in the center of the outer most piece, follow by taps around the edges to ensure the entire panel has connected.

Image: Fully Assembled Structure

We've done a lot of testing on Nodes, probably more than we should have.

Here is a list of things we've learned the hard way, in hopes that you won't have to.

1.) Test with smaller pieces first, make sure that everything works at a small scale before doing batch printing. Check out our free tolerance kit here <link to tolerance kit>

2.) Choose the right material for the job. If you want for indoors, we'd recommended PLA, PLA+, or PETG. If you want to use it outdoors, we'd recommend ASA.

3.) Check out all of our guides!

Building Guide

Printing Guide

Materials Guide

More content goes here.