As I approached Pi Towers on Monday, I noticed a stormtrooper head on a stick in the grass out the front. I was pretty certain it hadn’t been there before. When this sort of thing happens, I head to the Maker Lab and ask our Maker in Residence, Toby, what in the actual is happening. Nine times out of ten he claims he is making said strange thing for reasons.

Check your calendars!

Lo and behold, Toby confirmed that he’d decided to 3D print a full-size stormtrooper helmet to wear at work on Star Wars Day. Thing is, May 4th falls on a Saturday this year, and folks don’t typically work Saturdays around here. So now he’s just wandering around the office in a stormtrooper helmet on May 3rd.

How was it made?

Toby printed the helmet at Pi Towers on the Bambu Lab X1C 3D printer in our Maker Lab. It’s a fused deposition modelling (FDM) printer. This type of printer is what you use when you need speed over precision and you’re looking for an efficient and cost-effective choice to make prototypes.

There was no need to render a bespoke design for the helmet because Toby found one @KeepTheBOX had made earlier on Printables. This is a full-size stormtrooper helmet designed to be worn by professional adults like ourselves in the workplace. It also fits our giant robot LEGO figure, which is handy if for no other reason than stormtrooper helmets don’t fit on our coat racks.

Pi-powered upgrades

Toby made this prototype in haste to lock in something Star Wars-themed in time for tomorrow, but there are plans to upgrade it in time for next year. Current thinking is to stick a microphone in the mouthpiece and hide a Raspberry Pi-powered voice changer in there. The Raspberry Pi forums suggest using Lyrebird to make this upgrade happen. We’d have to bust through some of the heavy-duty filament around the mouthpiece first, though — it’s a thick print design through which I doubt even James Earl Jones’ booming voice could be heard. Wait… he voiced Darth Vader, didn’t he? Never mind.

Warning for glasses wearers

A final note from Toby, who is a glasses wearer: “Unless you can also wear contact lenses, you will stack it at least once a minute while you’re wearing it on account of your glasses plus your face not fitting inside the helmet.” [It’s true; watch the video I made below — Ed.]

Anyway, if you’re reading this on Saturday, well done for consuming your Star Wars Day content right on time. Some of us are just too efficient for our own good.

Raspberry Pi-powered 3D printing

We also have a Raspberry Pi-powered 3D printer in the Maker Lab: an Ender-3 S1 Pro. But it prints more slowly than our other model and, like we keep saying, we needed to print this ready for May 4th. It’s a more affordable 3D printer, though, so it would be the best choice for many makers.

A Raspberry Pi 4 runs Octoprint to bring your design to life, and a Raspberry Pi camera keeps an eye on things, allowing for remote monitoring. If, for example, you see your 27-hour print start to go awry, you can access your 3D printer controls through any internet browser and pause proceedings remotely before you waste precious filament. We’ve created this handy tutorial showing you how to control your 3D printer using OctoPrint and Raspberry Pi.