Nintendo Labo Variety Kit & 3D Printing

Last week I picked up a the new Nintendo Labo Variety Kit. It’s a super fun construction set and game cartridge for the Nintendo Switch.

The box is huge and contains a bunch of pre-cut cardboard sheets to build a number of projects that use various parts of the Switch console. Projects include a remote control car, a fishing rod, a piano and a house. Each project can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to assemble. It’s basically the ultimate ‘game’ for makers since building and customizing these projects can be more fun than the resulting ‘game’ you play with them.

I knew as soon as it was announced that there would be a huge opportunity to design and 3D print replacements for the cardboard projects. It wasn’t clear if there would be much depth to the ‘games’ in the kit but it seemed like there would be some options to customize what these projects do from within the cartridge, not to mention the customization options you can do to the cardboard itself.

The first thing you build is a small holder for the Joycon to get the hang of the folding you need to do with the cardboard. The app really holds your hand in making it easy to understand the steps and lets you look at the part at hand from any direction and lets you easily go back and forward through the instructions.

Next up was the RC car. It’s the quickest project to build at about 10-15 minutes and also seemed to be the most obvious 3D printable to design and print.

It was an easy build and I really like how Nintendo designed it to work by simply changing the frequency of the vibration motors in each Joycon to make it skittle across the table/floor. Somehow, I missed that one of the Joycons has an infrared camera (I thought it was just simply a remote control kind of IR). So you can actually see (sort of) where the car is pointing on the display on the Switch tablet screen.

You can fine tune the speed and power with the sliders on the screen to find the optimal controls. I was actually surprised how robust the cardboard ‘carrier’ was in this case. All the cardboard is solid and durable. Nevertheless, I wanted to try making a printable version.

Fortunately, Nintendo has released PDF files for all the kits to allow you to make your own replacements either with a laser cutter or simply just a box cutter and some old boxes (thanks Amazon!) if you’re crafty.

I started with the PDF file for the RC Car and created an SVG file of the profile of the car and brought it into TinkerCAD. I then merged it with the rails from these Joycon knuckles as it was the easiest to cut down to the raw rails for the Joycons.

It would have been tricky to print without a lot of support so I made a few changes to the model and rotated it to print vertically with minimal support.

The final result turned out better than I expected. It was super light and very sturdy.

But does it work?
Yes! Kind of. It was tricky getting the frequencies just right for the left and right side, combined with a slippery floor, it wasn’t quite as controllable as the cardboard original. Here’s it in action:

This was knocked out in a few minutes in TinkerCAD. I suspect many others will make a better design in the coming days/weeks. Some discussions with others seems to point that the printed Joycon rails may be too rigid and not vibrate enough to move the same way as the cardboard version which seems like an easy thing to adjust and try.

You can get my printable file from Thingiverse if you want to try it yourself. Micah Brown has published cleaned up versions of the PDFs for easier laser cutting and printing if you want another take on the RC Car but also some of the other projects.

I bought the Variety Kit mostly for the Piano which was a much more involved build. It took me about 4 hours (off and on) to assemble and was actually a lot of fun despite all the folding (so much folding) of the cardboard parts. I’m not quite ready to model a 3D printable version of it yet though but I suspect someone else will beat me to it. It has a lot of moving parts and some clever tricks to make the keys register with the Switch (using reflective tape on each key that gets caught on the IR camera). But for now, enjoy my pathetic keyboarding skills that successfully annoyed the crap out of my cat:

In case you were wondering, my Joycons (and Switch) have these replacement shells I installed myself. It’s not for the faint of heart as it requires extensive disassembly but I’m very happy with the results and they feel just like the OEM shells.