Skip to main content

Engineer plans his apartment floor layout by 3D-printing a scale model

Anyone who has ever moved to a new apartment with furniture they already own will have spent a moment worrying about whether everything will fit in their new living space.

That’s the situation engineer Craig Broady recently found himself in when he relocated to a new apartment, boasting smaller rooms and plenty of awkward wall angles. Fortunately, as an employee of leading 3D printing company Formlabs, he had a leg up on most other people.

Recommended Videos

“I had some furniture, but not everything, and I wanted to figure out how to get the apartment as complete as possible when I moved in, without buying anything that was too big,” Broady told Digital Trends. “One of my co-workers commented, half-jokingly, that I could model and print everything — and then rearrange it myself. I maybe took him a little too seriously because I did exactly that.”

That’s right: Using cloud-based CAD program Onshape, a Formlabs Form 2 SLA 3D printer, and some recycled cardboard, Broady designed and printed an exact 1:25 scale replica of his new apartment, complete with all the furniture he either owned or was considering buying. According to Broady, he created all the assets himself — with the exception of a mini espresso machine and cat which he found online.

The amount of detail is impressive, but Broady said that the pieces actually took relatively little time to go from concept to CAD to physical model. In its finished form, it’s a neat example of 3D printing in action — and while not all of us will necessarily go as far as to build scale models of our future homes, it’s great to know that it’s an option.

So how did Broady’s measurements pan out when he actually moved into his new apartment?

“Fortunately everything fit exactly as planned,” he said. “It was useful to be able to plan in advance how to fit some really tight space objects, like the cat’s litter box, between the wall and the radiator in the kitchen. Aside from the color and scale, everything looked the same in reality as it did in my model.”

Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
AMD teases performance of its revolutionary 3D V-cache chip
AMD CEO holding 3D V-Cache CPU.

AMD is currently readying its new Ryzen 7 5800X3D, featuring a 3D V-cache, and it looks like we may soon have a powerful processor on our hands. AMD has teased that we can expect an up to 15% performance boost over the base Ryzen 7 5800X.

The tech giant talked about the new chip during the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSSC) and revealed more information about its architecture. While the Ryzen 7 5800X3D will certainly be an improvement, will it be enough to compete with Intel's best processors?

Read more
Fighting football injuries with 3D-printed, hyper-personalized pads
The Protect3d 3D scanning process.

If you’ve ever watched a movie about sports, you’ve seen it. It's that moment that occurs two-thirds of the way into the story, when the protagonists’ inevitable victory suddenly seems a lot less certain. Maybe the inspirational mentor winds up in the ER, muttering motivational slogans from a hospital bed. Perhaps the unorthodox coach wins over the team, only to be fired by management for thinking too far outside the box. Possibly the star lacrosse player has a crisis of faith and realizes he wants to be an acapella singer rather than a jock.

 

Read more
AMD’s 3D-stacked Ryzen 7 5800X3D is ‘world’s fastest gaming processor’
AMD CEO presenting new CPU.

The first processor to use a 3D V-Cache technology was announced at the big AMD CES 2022 keynote. The tech was first announced at Computex 2021, and fans have been eagerly awaiting a processor that will put it to use.

That processor is the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which seems like a strange place to start a new range of processors. AMD has its Ryzen 9 chips, after all. That's because the new Ryzen 7 can outclass AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X while gaming, despite using the same architecture.

Read more