Ayushmaan's 3D Mini-Macintosh Clock Was Built with a 2D Printer — Thanks to the Power of Papercraft

Mononymous maker and electrical/electronics engineering student Ayushmaan has built an Apple Macintosh-inspired desk clock with a twist: its housing is made using papercraft, rather than 3D printing.

"I am always fascinated by retro tech, and I especially love those old [Apple] Macintosh Classics," Ayushmaan explains. "I wanted to make something that feels vintage but works with modern hardware. Not just a clock on a screen — something that looks like it came from the '80s but actually pulls data from the internet. Originally, I was planning to 3D-print the whole body, but honestly, everyone does that nowadays. I wanted to build something that anyone could make, even without a 3D printer. Paper is cheap and available everywhere; with a bit of patience, it can look pretty clean and sturdy. So, I made everything with paper only. It ended up better than expected."

The inspiration for the build is a 3D model of Apple's Macintosh, released in 1984 as the first in the company's breakthrough personal computer family and later known as the Macintosh 128K to distinguish it from the upgraded Macintosh 512K. The original was constructed from plastic around a 9" monochrome cathode-ray tube display, but Ayushmaan's version is scaled down in order to replace the original monitor with a compact 320×240 TFT display connected over SPI to an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller board.

After importing the model into Blender and tweaking it as required, Ayushmaan used the Pepakura tool to unfold the model into two dimensional nets. Once printed on card, these nets were cut out and glued to form the shell — with no need for a 3D printer. Finally, the software connects the microcontroller board to OpenWeather and pulls down temperature, humidity, current weather conditions, and air quality information, which is displayed on a custom dashboard alongside the time.

The project is documented in full on Instructables.