How I Designed the World’s Smallest FDM Articulated Turtle We all love minis — they’re trendy, collectible, and satisfying to print. Most of the designs I develop are full-scale articulations with well-sculpted details and refined geometry. But for a long time, I’ve wanted to create a true miniature — something tiny yet mechanically functional. The problem? I was never satisfied with the detail and articulation quality when scaled down. While I was sculpting the standard articulated turtle, an old friend reached out. He uses a 120mm print bed exclusively for research purposes but always wanted to try printing an articulated model. That stuck with me. As I worked on the full-size turtle, I kept the X and Y dimensions within 120mm — though it eventually crept up to 126mm. After releasing the full-scale version, I began researching how to scale it down without sacrificing clearance or articulation integrity. That led me to revisit one of my older designs: the ball-joint links from...
The project started as a 1 meter Cartesian Cube. But for easy transportation around the house, I had to reduce the printer width to 83 cm from 1 meter. Printer details can be found below ; Max tested printing speed : 150mm/s Best results as of now : 75mm/s with 550 acceleration & 0.04 junction Deviation Printer dimensions : Length : 120 cm Width : 83 cm Height : 83 cm Current Print Dimension : 60 × 60 × 50 cm Print Dimension upgradable : 120*83*83 cm Endstops set to : 48x * 38y * 28z cm Firmware : Marlin 2.0.6.1 upgraded to 2.0.8.2 with SKR2 Steps per unit A4988 (100, 100, 2600, 95) DRV8825 (200, 200, 5200, 190) Iinear Advancement K = 0.22 Baud 250000 # printing Material (All metal) [PLA, ABS, Nylon, ASA, TPU etc] # 1.75mm filament # 100k ntc b 3950 Thermistor # 12v 40w heating cartridge # E3D V6 All Metal J-Head Hotend Extruder PID Tuning 195°c Kp : 41.88 Ki : 7.41 Kd : 59.18 185°c Kp : 42.65 Ki : 7.23 Kd : 62.90 # Fat Nema extreme Extrusio...