Why 3D print the enclosures instead of injection molding?

Volume and freedom. Injection molding makes sense when you’re committing to tens of thousands of identical parts; a one-person lab shipping small batches in a handful of styles would be buried in tooling costs. Printing means an enclosure revision can go from idea to installed on a shipping unit the same week, with no mold to re-cut and no minimum order.

Are 3D printed enclosures durable enough?

For desk duty, absolutely. These are housings for a display, not drone frames. Every shell is printed with settings tuned for strength where the screws bite and the stand clips in. The honest tradeoff is cosmetic: printed parts have a faint layer texture instead of injection-molded gloss, which I think reads as ‘handmade’ rather than ‘cheap’, because it is.

Can I request a custom enclosure color?

Ask! The standard lineup is Red, Blue, Gray, Black, Semi-Transparent, and Glow-in-the-Dark (Seismic Sentinel adds two of its own, Hyper Red/Blue and Hyper Yellow/Green), but filament comes in nearly every color imaginable. Message the shop on Etsy and I’ll talk about what’s practical.

Why two different printers instead of two of the same?

Because they’re good at different things: one is the multicolor generalist, the other the precision specialist with a second nozzle. Two identical machines would double capacity; two different machines double capability. In a small shop, capability wins.

The Printers Behind the Shells: a Flashforge AD5X and a Bambu Lab X2D

Every gadget that leaves this lab is wearing a shell that was printed a few feet from where it was assembled. No contract manufacturer, no crate of injection-molded housings from overseas — a spool of filament goes in one end of the workshop and a finished enclosure comes out the other, usually the same day it’s needed.

Two machines do that work, and they earn their bench space differently.

The generalist: Flashforge AD5X

The AD5X is the workhorse — a CoreXY machine (both motors drive the printhead together, which is how modern printers go fast without shaking themselves apart) rated up to 600 mm/s with a 220 × 220 × 220 mm build volume. PlankLabs shells are small parts, so raw speed translates directly into shells-per-day.

Its party trick is the built-in IFS — Intelligent Filament System — which feeds up to four filaments through one nozzle and switches between them automatically. That’s the machine answering for the shop’s whole personality: Red, Blue, Gray, and Black enclosures without babysitting spool changes, and the freedom to mix colors in a single part when a design calls for it.

The quieter features matter just as much for a shop that prints daily: a 300 °C direct-drive extruder that doesn’t flinch at unusual filaments, pressure-sensor auto-leveling (the machine measures its own nozzle height and compensates — no shims, no feeler gauges), a flexible PEI steel plate that releases finished parts with a satisfying pop, and print-resume after a power blip. Reliability features sound boring until you’re running a printer like an appliance. Then they’re the whole point.

The specialist: Bambu Lab X2D

The X2D’s headline is two nozzles — a direct-drive extruder and a second Bowden-fed one — and that changes what’s possible rather than just how fast it happens.

With one nozzle, support material (the scaffolding a printer builds under overhangs) is the same plastic as the part, and tearing it off leaves scars exactly where you don’t want them. With two, the second nozzle can lay down a different material at the interface, and supports fall away leaving clean surfaces. It also means two materials or colors in one part without the purge waste of swapping through a single nozzle.

Add the heated chamber — which keeps warp-prone engineering plastics dimensionally honest — plus LiDAR-assisted calibration watching the actual print, and the X2D is the machine for the parts where precision is the feature: tight screw bosses, crisp stand clips, the fits that make a hand-assembled gadget feel like a product instead of a project.

What actually matters (the unglamorous truth)

Spec sheets sell printers; repeatability ships products. The thing that makes 3D printing viable as light manufacturing isn’t the top speed — it’s the hundredth shell matching the first one, the first layer landing perfectly without ritual sacrifice, and specialty filaments behaving predictably. The Glow-in-the-Dark and Semi-Transparent shells in the shop each have their own personality at the nozzle, and dialing a filament in once — then trusting the machine to repeat it — is the entire game.

That’s also the honest case for printing in-house instead of outsourcing: when the enclosure is the product’s body, you want the feedback loop measured in hours. A design tweak in the morning is a physical part by lunch and on a shipping unit by the weekend. No factory in the world offers that turnaround to a one-person lab — but a couple of good printers within arm’s reach do.