Happy Birthday

For Instructables’ 20th birthday, I wanted to create something special: a flat-printed Instructables Robot with a gift featuring the number “20.” To make the celebration even more festive, I also added a small music box element in a matching style, so the project brings both visuals and sound to the party.

One of the unique challenges of this design is the printing process itself. Because of the many color layer changes, it requires patience and careful print settings to ensure that all layers and details come out cleanly. This makes the robot not only a fun decorative object, but also an exciting 3D printing challenge.

For this project, I designed the model in Fusion 360 and prepared it for printing with the PrusaSlicer. The final piece was created on a 3D printer using different filament colors of my choice to highlight the robot, the gift, and the details like the “20.”

I began with a simple 2D sketch of the Instructables Robot and the birthday gift in Fusion 360, keeping the design flat and printable.

In Fusion 360, I turned the sketch into a 3D model. To make the color changes stand out, I gave each element (that shares the same color) different heights. It’s best to also assign colors to the different layers in Fusion – this helps to keep an overview and makes it easier to plan the filament swaps later.

In PrusaSlicer, I prepared the file for multi-color printing. I defined the exact layer heights for filament swaps and checked the preview carefully to ensure every color change was in the right position. Proper layer planning here is essential, since the whole challenge of the project is printing with many color swaps.

I printed the model with a 3D printer using several filament colors of my choice. Each time the slicer paused for a color change, I swapped the filament manually. The print required patience, but the clean layer transitions gave the robot a bright and festive look