Show HN: PLAttice, for assembling structures much larger than the 3D printer bed

Summary

PLAttice PLAttice: it's an assembled lattice, built entirely out of 3D printed parts made from PLA. The name could also be short for Plastic Lattice, I suppose. PLAttice is composed of struts, nodes, and pins; in this example, these three part types are grey, brown, and ivory colored, respectively. The pins are slightly tapered and hold the struts into the nodes using what I sometimes call orthogonal taper pin joints, previously demonstrated in metal and wood. PLAttice came about because I got a new personal 3D printer and wanted to reversibly construct structures substantially larger than the print bed. The project succeeded nicely, with a PLAttice square box truss weighing around 800 g/m (roughly equivalent to 2x2 lumber) and being capable of spanning up to around 4 m before buckling. The struts are far and away the weakest member, failing in compression long before the joints or nodes give out; a reasonable iteration would relax the PLA-only requirement and use a different material (like bamboo dowels) for these elements, or at least beef up their width a bit. PLAttice doesn't form cubic crystalline structures; instead, it's designed to make square box trusses that can double up side-to-side or branch off at 60 degree angles as needed. In that way it's somewhat more anisotropic and limited as compared to systems based on cubic stacking arrangements, but works well for forms that are long and spindly and perhaps a bit tree-like. The nodes each host up to ten struts, but in practice a typical box truss only uses six joints per node. This tiling keeps nodes relatively small and makes eight of the ten pins easy to install and remove; the last two have to angle a bit during insertion to clear support tabs, but they aren't too bad with a bit of practice. In addition to the three core parts, there are a few extra bits that help structures fit into the built environment. End nodes and short struts square off the end of a box truss, and can be bolted onto a routed plywood...