My 5 year old daughter has been watching me 3D print for most of her life, so it was no surprise when she asked me if her dolls could have a 3D printer of their own. I originally intended to just print her one of the little 3D printer keychains I've seen here on Thingiverse, but in the end decided to do something a little more personal. With nothing more than a ruler and an evening in OpenSCAD, I created the PrintrBot Mini.

The PB Mini is a roughly 1/5th scale model of the PrintrBot Simple Metal, which looked about right to go with her large Barbie and Ken dolls. I didn't go into any detail on the extruder at this scale, but did think it was important to show the hotend and autolevel sensor, since those are the most obvious visual features (and the most colorful).

Update 12/2/16: Bring hotend and sensor to edge of arm to help with overhang

Issues

The SCAD file is a wreck; I wanted to do something properly parametric so you could render it at an arbitrary scale, but in the end it's pretty hacky.

I really wanted to do something more impressive with the fan, but in the end it is just a flat panel. Could probably paint some detail on the outside if you wanted, but I figured any kind of printed effect (like trying to print tiny "blades") would get lost at this scale.

In terms of usability, the hole in the arm to accept the tower is definitely too small, and I had to use a file to widen it up before the arm would smoothly slide on it.

Printing Notes

Base

Simple print; I personally switched from black to silver while printing the base to get the two-tone effect, but you could just as easily paint the "tower" to get a similar effect.

Arm

The arm prints with no support, though the overhang over the hotend and sensor might be a bit much for some machines. All the detail painting is required on this piece, you could skip it and just leave it as-is, but I don't think the visual effect would be as good.

Bed

This is just a rectangle; either paint it or print it in a different color than the base. I find that the blue PLA from PrintrBot is almost the exact same color as 3M painters tape, so it worked great.