3Duino Lowers the Barrier to Entry for 3D-Printed Devices, Creates Functional Gadgets in 13 Minutes
Static models can be transformed into working electronic gadgets, researchers claim, in just a few minutes.
Researchers at Canada's Simon Fraser University, the University of Texas at Dallas, and Florida State University have developed a platform that aims to make it easier to build physical 3D-printed devices with integrated interactivity: 3Duino.
"We present 3Duino, a unified software and hardware platform that enables users to prototype interactive devices without specialized expertise in mechanical design, electronics and programming," the researchers explain, in a paper brought to our attention by the Arduino team. "With 3Duino, users can assign desired input and output functionalities (e.g., touch input, motion sensing, lighting, or physical actuation) directly to a 3D model."
The idea of putting electronics inside 3D-printed housings isn't new, of course, but the 3Duino platform stands out by its goal of present as a low a barrier to entry as possible — allowing would-be makers to select from a range of input and output functions and to use natural language prompts to generate valid code for an Arduino Nano 33 BLE microcontroller board housed on a custom PCB.
"For each specified function, 3Duino automatically generates the necessary internal interactive structures, designed for single-piece 3D printing, minimizing post-processing and ensuring seamless compatibility with the 3Duino hardware," the team explains. "In addition, 3Duino also allows users to define interaction logic using natural language statements through its interface. Based on these statements, the system generates the corresponding control code to run on the hardware."
To test the system out, the researchers turned to 10 study participants aged between 22 and 28 and gave them the job of turning an existing static 3D model into something interactive — adding a waving arm and touch-activated light-up eyes to a lucky cat, or adding functionality to models of a windmill, turtle, plant, or car — and found that the tasks could be completed in just 13 minutes, with a high level of reported usability.
The team's work has been published in the Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication 2025 (SCF '25), under open-access terms.