Print with Perler beads

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Perler beads allow you to make fun designs by melting these tiny colored objects together, but why arrange them by hand when you can have a machine do it for you? That’s the idea behind this hack by YouTuber knezult11, where a non-working delta 3D printer is heavily modified to dispense beads instead of filament.

The setup uses a Python program to analyze any image and select between the machine’s array of 64 bead colors for pixels, while control of the system itself is accomplished with the help of two Arduino boards.

Perlers are fed using tubes and mechanical actuators, creating beautiful sprites without the tedium of placing every single bead. Once done “printing,” the machine’s heated bed fuses the result together rather than the typical ironing method.

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