Penrose Tiles 3D printed fabric

thingiverse

This is a "3D printed fabric" where the units are Penrose tiles. The tiles are printed separately and can then be clipped together with no extra tools. The clips enforce the matching rules, so you can only assemble it into a proper Penrose tile pattern. The units are designed to print without support. They use a minimum of material, so the fabric is relatively light but somewhat fragile. Don't worry too much if one of the clips breaks while assembling it, as there is enough redundancy for that not to matter. They are oriented diagonally, so that if your first layer uses a diagonal line pattern then it will be lined up along the direction of the rhombuses, which looks good. A useful tip: in a Penrose tiling, the ratio of thin to thick rhombuses is the Golden ratio, 1:1.618. So you need more thick units than thin ones. The golden ratio is approximated by successive Fibonacci numbers, so it's a good idea to print, say, 8 thick and 5 thin rhombuses at the same time, or 13 thick and 8 thin ones. Also note that it's possible to put Penrose tiles together in a way that stops you from adding any more tiles - if that happened you'd have to take it apart again and do something different. However, that didn't happen to me. There's a little bit of a puzzle in figuring out how to put the tiles together, but you get the hang of it pretty quickly.