My mom recently ordered a set of Mixtiles to try and decorate our house. I was tasked with finding a clean layout for our set of photos and mounting it on the wall. This became a more time consuming task than I had initially thought I signed up for. After some “googling” I found a setup with a nice aesthetic (staggered columns) and got it approved by the whole family.

The next step was doing some math on how to space the photos and map them out onto our chosen wall surface. This became a time intensive process since I was limited to a ruler, a measuring tape, and my iPhone’s measure app to use as a level. I started on the first column and started measuring out the position of the first Mixtile. This took around 20 minutes, but the issue was that I would have to repeat this process over and over for the next 16 Mixtiles, especially since I wanted to keep them perfectly straight, inline, and level, otherwise it would look very sloppy. After repeating a handful of times, I was kind of done with doing this the old fashion way my dad had suggested.

I broke out my laptop and some 3D modeling software (Fusion 360) and started creating a small tool that would auto align one Mixtile after the other. After a solid 10 minutes of design and 20 minutes of fabrication on my custom 3D printer, I was ready to start going through the mounting process a LOT faster. I only needed to measure the first of each column and the tool would handle the succeeding Mixtiles. In the time it was taking to mount a couple Mixtiles, I was able to make a far more robust solution that could also be used in the future. I was able to finish the last 10 Mixtiles in under 30 minutes, a significant upgrade. I think this really showed the amazing application to 3D printing and the problems it can solve.

This was a fun one day project and now I can take a trip down memory lane every time I walk past that wall. I think Mixtiles should really include a tool like this in the box since it costed me only 10 cents to make and dramatically helped achieve the artsy look they advertise on their website.