I scored my niece a 3D printer for Xmas last year. Black Friday thing and a lower price than I'd ever seen one for. Unfortunately -- a little too hard for her, especially after the company went out of business and it had to be operated with a series of open source software in order to work.
After replacing it with a more kid-friendly App driven alternative, I end up with my own 3D printer. You can only print so many Daleks....okay....well...you can print a lot of Daleks....but these things can actually be useful!
Did you know this existed?!?! I didn't until just last week!
A site called the "Thingiverse" is also loaded with great ideas like these.
I love all 3 of these. They're things designed to help those of us with freakishly large hands work with tiny PCR tubes.
There are some remarkable similarities between using the 3D printers and mass spectrometry. Resolution is a big deal. Expensive printers can achieve higher resolution in shorter time. Little discontinued $150 printers like mine can produce high resolution toys and tools, but it might take all night to do it.
If you've actually read this far and have access to one of these things -- this is the stuff I've found the most user friendly:
Ultimaker Cura -- free software for taking premade objects and scaling them and adjusting them to print on anything
TinkerCad -- Create your own stuff for printing (which I then send to Cura and then convert to .gcode for printing)
Okay -- and just a reminder that THIS exists....
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