What skills do you need for our 3D printed kits? A behind the scenes deep dive.

We started with a fairly simple premise: Deliver awesome kits that utilize your 3d printer, and come with all the parts needed, guaranteed to work.  Sounds easy, right? It turns out that the more you explore this concept, the more complicated that simple proposition gets. 

Lets focus on one single aspect; skill level. This is a big one that we've been adjusting with every project. Lets dig into our behind the scenes thoughts and a few different angles to shed light on where we are now and what skills you need. 

the absolute shortest version is: If you can print precise models and do some basic soldering, you can build our kits. Sometimes we don't even need the soldering. Subscribe now! 

The longer answer is much more interesting. Before I go further into this, I need to set the stage. We're still a new company and we're still figuring out exactly what we're doing. What I'm describing to you here will be a behind the scenes look at things that we've processed over the past year and are still processing while we try to make our kits the absolute best they can be. I'm saying its all a work in progress, so lets look at some of that work. 

The big three

I've broken down our areas of discussion internally into 3 main areas. This completely ignores people's ability to read a manual or watch a video and put screws into holes. Solder, Code, and print complexity.

Solder vs no solder

This is a huge one. For those of us who have been tinkering with electronics for decades, something like soldering seems like a beginner skill that EVERYONE has. However, we've seen that this really isn't the case. With the explosion of high quality dirt cheap printers hitting the market the past few years, we see people who are into 3d printing that have absolutely zero electronics background and frankly find a soldering iron scary. Over the last year we've had more than a handful of people tell us they were unsubscribing because they can't solder. 

We've had to rethink how we'll address this multiple times over the past year. One solution that seems to be a good middle ground between soldering and completely custom cables is to use jumper cables with dupont sockets on the end. It is far from perfect becuase they can wiggle loose, but it allows us to do solderless design without the added expense of custom cabling. 

This isn't always the approach. We've had a few kits in recent memory that we just asked people to solder items. For example, the LED strip in our PrintBrite kit solders directly to the pins of the esp32. In retrospect, we probably should have gone with dupont sockets on that one and if we do another run of them, we probably will. We've worked with our vendor and found some custom cabling to be surprisingly affordable, and managed to work it into our budgets, like we did in the PixelClock! 

(above: sneak preview of an upcoming project that has soldering and precise print requirements. Don't judge my soldering, I have a hand tremor)

We have one project coming up that actually requires a considerable amount of basic soldering. We're stating that on the box but for our beginner subscribers, this might be offputting. However, we can't forget about our advanced subscribers too! It is a bit of a balancing act. We try to alternate skill level a bit. Our subscribers may have noticed that in action. 

This topic is one we don't have a solid answer for. Should soldering be a skill we require? Should we strive to do away with soldering all together? You tell me!

Tight tolerances on printers

It isn't only the direct skills of the person assembling the kit either. We have to account for people's "3d printing skill" or machine tuning. Not all machines are created equal! Some print perfect dimensionally accurate parts with extremely tight tolerances and some don't. 

Before you start thinking I mean specific brands and models, I don't. In our internal testing we have had parts that we have tested on Prusa Mk4 machines located in Maine, Pennsylvania, and Missouri and found that extremely tight tolerance parts (think .1mm and smaller) didn't work on those machines consistently. Same with our Bambu testing. Things like humidity, filament color and brand, machine wear and tear etc can all play a role. Our designs have to work for our customers, that's our whole schtick, so we have to account for that variance. This means designing things with bigger tolerances than might be absolutely necessary, or avoiding situations where an extremely tight tolerance is needed. We have been landing somewhere between .2mm and .3mm tolerances with pretty good results.

People can, and should, learn to tune their machines. Even if you're not having problems, you may find that learning to tune your machine will give you much better results. 

Code vs no code

Code is an area where we've made massive changes, and we're finally getting to where I want things to be. I'm a firm believer that for us, code is not a priority. Our goal is to produce an awesome 3d printed kit, not teach you to code. There are plenty of other groups out there focusing on teaching code.

 If anything, we should include more learning about 3d printing as that is the thing that sets our kits apart from other kit subscriptions.

I don't want our clients to have to open the Arduino IDE ever. They shouldn't have to deal with dependency issues, board libraries, or the computer not communicating with the dev board. They should be able to just put their kit together and have fun with 3d printing.

To achieve this we've been pushing through a variety of ways to use the awesome web flashing tools available out there. My first introduction to this concept was through WLED, (thanks for showing me this Matt Stultz!), where you just plug in an esp32 and open their web page and it will dump all the code onto the board for you! 

We experimented with this a bit, with varied levels of ease. First we used someone else's web loader and now we've built our own. You just plug in the board, select the project, and hit go and it loads the code for you. So easy. 

As cool as this is, I actually think it is just a stepping stone. I think in the long term we'll just send out all the boards pre-loaded with the proper software. No need for loading code whatsoever. That brings its own complexities, but I think it would be the best experience for a 3d printing focused kit company. 

Things to consider that aren't your skills

All of this is somewhat complicated by time constraints right now. There are two main time constraint areas that have drastically effected some of our designs and continue to do so. 

Time constraint for design

We put out a fresh project every month . That's a lot. Consider for a moment what all that entails:

• coming up with a design concept
• designing and testing it
• designing the retail packaging
• ordering all the parts for the kits
• testing the final kits to make sure they actually work
• filming the tutorial video
• making the assembly manual
• making our instructions page
• uploading it all to printables with proper orientations etc. 

Those are just the big points, there are a lot more small things that slot in between those as well. This kind of workload on such a tight deadline means that corners get cut all over. Specifically you'll see lots of things such as the example I mentioned above on soldering the wires in the Printbrite kit. If we had more time to test we would have probably made that decision and refined a few design aspects a tiny bit more.  

I'm working hard to get us further and further ahead so that the time crunch plays less of a role in how we do things, but it is an uphill battle and very much ongoing.

 I'm proud to say that as of July 2026, we weren't actively working on the next month's project up until delivery, we're actually working ahead.

I'd like to make that gap bigger so we can do more refinement of designs. Every kit that has shipped has had something come up where we've said "oooh, we should have done that instead". That's just how development works! 

Time constraint for assembly

Here's a time concern that many don't even consider! When thinking about customer satisfaction, I tend to think about how long a project takes to assemble. If the bulk of our subscribers are somewhat beginner level folks, they will likely find something that takes hours and hours to assemble to be frustrating. I want to give them the satisfaction of completing the project in less than a half an hour. That's not a hard time constraint backed by statistics but rather just a gut feeling. I could totally be wrong, but it is something I've put thought into and pushed to keep. 

This half hour limit, as arbitrary as it is, might get tossed away though. We've discussed doing much more involved and complex kits. Those would do away with our internal fixed budget of parts and fixed time for completion in favor of delivering a much more involved build and impressive result. We don't have any of these bigger more complex kits available but we have discussed them internally for quite some time and we all agree that people would enjoy them. Just maybe the folks who would enjoy them might be the more skilled users. 

Sharing more

I hope you found something of interest in this behind the scenes breakdown of how we approach skill levels. Let us know if you'd like to hear more about design or what kind of tutorials you'd like to see!