STEMFIE, a 3D-printable construction set toy

Very cool! I still think to date one of the coolest uses of 3D printing I've seen is the Free Universal Construction Kit[0]. There are adapters for any pairing of LEGO, Lincoln Logs, K'NEX, and several others. This is something that would likely never happen commercially due to licensing issues.

[0] https://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit/

I like the idea of this sort of thing. Lots of different predesigned parts, cool, cool.

But it's axe grinding time.

As I recall from digging into STEMFIE a while ago (because I can't find this information on the site), they use some odd base unit like 12.5mm, which I assume is chosen because it's approximately half an inch (12.7mm), but "more metric". Which as far as unit systems goes, gives you the worst of both worlds, in that it will almost, but not quite, fit with your 1/2-inch based construction systems (like Erector Set/Meccano beams), and the metric numbers end up being not all that nice anyway (if you subdivide a beam in half or thirds you up with 6.25 or 4.167mm), so you may as well have picked exact compatibility with an existing system, anyway.

I wish people were less afraid to use "half an inch" as their base unit, if that's the size they want. It's as if they hear 'metric is superior' in grade school and think that means that real-world objects that happen to be designed around something other multiples of 10 of some metric unit are yucky and they'd better adjust it slightly so nobody notices, even if that means throwing out compatibility with a lot of existing stuff.

Okay rant over.

This looks like it would solve a problem for me, thanks for sharing! Candidly, I'm a bit turned off by the name, the framing as a "toy", and honestly the ergonomics of the website (compared to similar systems like https://gridfinity.xyz/ or https://gridbeam.xyz/), but the underlying system seems like what I'm looking for.

I've been prototyping some models with a 3D printer, and have unfortunately been building my own sort of "construction set" so that I can minimize my print times and only reprint the parts that have changed. This means that I can mostly print flat pieces, which take an hour rather than 12 hours, but trying to invent a modularity system takes time (and iterations), which detracts from iterating on the thing I'm actually working on.

For anyone having trouble navigating the website, I'd recommend starting at https://www.stemfie.org/parts?view=category&id=14, or maybe skimming https://thangs.com/designer/Stemfie3D/sort/downloads if you just want to see the most commonly used pieces.

3D printing obviously wins for low barrier to entry, but I wonder if it wouldn't be faster and cheaper at scale to make some of those parts the "traditional" way with molds or such. Maybe worth a group buy?

I don’t think this is a name clash in any meaningful way but I’d nevertheless like to share that in Dutch, a “stemfie” is a selfie that you take from inside the voting booth and I love that we have a 7 character word for that.