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STEMFIE is an amaz­ing, unique project that feels a lit­tle like an imag­i­na­tive 3D print­ed hybrid of LEGO Mind­storms and Mec­ca­no. All the part designs are freely shared and avail­able. This means peo­ple can 3D print local­ly build­ing their own part col­lec­tion, it’s mind bog­gling how many parts and projects there are!

A good start is to look at some of the projects fea­tured on the STEMFIE web­site which are beau­ti­ful­ly ren­dered in Blender. This gives you a taste of some of the parts avail­able and per­haps gives some inspi­ra­tion of what you can build. The project sec­tion fea­tures curat­ed list of parts need­ed to make a spe­cif­ic projects, a great way to begin to explore the STEMFIE parts. There are numer­ous stan­dards in the STEMFIE parts fam­i­lies to make every­thing work togeth­er well. Speak­ing to Paulo Kiefe, the dri­ving force behind STEMFIE, he is real­ly keen to talk tech­ni­cal­ly, div­ing into chat about why he went with a par­tic­u­lar beam hole spac­ing, or how he opti­mis­es thread­ed part designs for fil­a­ment based 3D print­ing. This pas­sion and ded­i­ca­tion to cre­at­ing decent design solu­tions real­ly shows itself in the inter­op­er­abil­i­ty of the STEMFIE parts.

Hav­ing looked at a few projects you might want to dive straight into look­ing at the full parts col­lec­tion. Paulo shares the part files as .3mf across a range of file shar­ing sites. This includes Bam­bu labs Mak­er World as well as OneDrive and Google Dri­ve so it’s easy to set up a syn­chro­nised copy of the part col­lec­tion that updates for you as new parts are designed or changes are made.

Div­ing into the part library, it’s immense! There are thou­sands of parts avail­able, from sim­ple beams and fas­ten­ers through to com­plex parts that host “vit­a­mins” or non print­ed com­po­nents like bear­ings or small motors. There are heaps of gears and gear­box­es and just look­ing at the parts inspires project ideas. Talk­ing with Paulo it’s obvi­ous how com­plex some of these parts are to design to the high stan­dard he main­tains: He dis­cuss­es that it’s rea­son­ably easy to design com­pat­i­ble parts to a stan­dard, but when you intro­duce exter­nal objects for inclu­sion inside 3D prints it ramps up the complexity.

Paulo devel­ops new parts in FreeCAD and as such has a FreeCAD tem­plate avail­able for those look­ing to design their own parts, he has also repli­cat­ed this tem­plate into Blender and Open­SCAD so every­one should be able to find an open­source tool they need to make STEMFIE parts. It’s obvi­ous Paulo is very knowl­edge­able and skilled in CAD envi­ron­ments. Paulo pre­vi­ous­ly owned Cre­ative Tools, a large Euro­pean com­pa­ny that was a reseller of CAD pack­ages and also pro­vid­ed train­ing and sup­port into the CAD indus­try. Paulo and the team at Cre­ative Tools are famed for being the cre­ators of a very well known 3D print­ing cal­i­bra­tion and test mod­el, Benchy!

So if you are a school, col­lege, Mak­er­space, Fablab a STEM edu­ca­tion provider, or sim­ply a curi­ous home builder, then we’d urge you to take a look around STEMFIE, there are so many bril­liant and imag­i­na­tive things you could build!