Link to the ProtoPipe

Every year, I challenge my Industrial Design students to an "intuitive engineering" contest: building bridges out of wooden sticks and 3D-printed nodes. Building these the standard way – juggling 3D-points, routing curves, queries, and pipe edges – works okay, but means a lot of going back and forth…

I wanted a tool that lets you drop 3D points on the fly, adjust their "Reach" to control connectivity, and instantly generate a prototype-ready structure.

Enter ProtoPipe! A fast way to design spaceframes that are easy to fabricate.

The tool is split into three simple tabs that guide you through the workflow:

• 3D-Points: Add and tweak your points, then set the "Reach." A Reach of 0 connects only to the nearest neighbor, while a 1 connects the point to everything in sight.
• Connections: Manually include or exclude specific lines if the automatic Reach settings need a little fine-tuning.
• Tubes and Nodes: Generate the final 3D geometry. And It preps the tubes so you can easily auto-layout them for fabrication later.

I'm not entirely sure if there is a massive real-world use case for this yet, so I’d love to hear what you all think. And maybe this is a case where a classic custom feature tree still makes more sense:)
But here are a few ideas to get you started

• Go big: Build structures way larger than your printer's build volume using standard PVC pipes.
• Scavenger prototyping: Use drinking straws, dry spaghetti, broomsticks, cardboard tubes, pool noodles selfiesticks….
• Print flexibility: We use SLS printers (which are perfect for the complex nodes), but standard FDM works perfectly fine too.
• Get flexible: inflatable bike tubes could create dynamic, flexible frames.
• Snap-fit Assembly: In an older Part Studio, I had partly open nodes working so you could snap the tubes in from the side – no sliding required!
  Bringing that back would mean changing the whole architecture, though...