Paper manuals and static exploded diagrams have been the standard way to follow a Voron build for years, so an animated, interactive assembly guide for the Stealthburner toolhead feels like a genuinely different approach. Hal Wayland has been working on exactly that, and the current alpha shows a 3D-modeled extruder assembly playing in real time on a light isometric grid, with step-by-step assembly and free orbit navigation around the model.
The technical setup is interesting in its own right. The extruder assembly was rendered in Blender, while the app itself is built on Three.js and Svelte. Hal also implemented a custom sequencer to drive the animations, which seems like a sensible way to keep the step timing under control. The modeled parts look faithful to the real thing: black and red printed housing pieces, heat-set inserts, bearings, drive gears, a shaft, a tensioner arm, a spring and screws, plus a red front cowl with a cooling fan cutout and a dark grey extruder body with its adjustment thumbscrew.
The planned direction is what stands out to me. The idea is a modular manual where selecting a section such as the hotend updates everything automatically, with clickable parts linking to STL downloads and part descriptions. There are also plans for a queue of upcoming parts beside the view with an animated camera picking a good angle, while users can still move around freely, and text instructions with a generated voice-over are on the roadmap.
It is clearly early days. The site is being rebuilt from scratch and is not visitable yet, and Hal says the work would have taken about a week without the technical issues that came up. The open question is whether this should extend to a full interactive manual for the complete printer, which Hal is asking the audience about directly.
Project by Hal Wayland. Watch it on their YouTube channel: