Can You 3D Print My Neighborhood? (Yes.)
The short answer is yes. Give us an address or a neighborhood name and we'll turn it into a four-color 3D-printed coaster using real map data. Works anywhere in the world where OpenStreetMap has coverage, which is essentially everywhere a person lives.
- Yes, any address, anywhere on Earth. 90mm round coaster, four colors (black base, white roads, raised grey buildings, green parks), printed on a Bambu A1 Mini using OpenStreetMap data.
- Price: $14.99 on Etsy and TikTok Shop. One coaster per order, more available on request.
- Lead time: we print to order. Roughly 6 hours of print time per coaster plus ship time. Typical end-to-end is 1-2 weeks.
- What you give us: an address, an intersection, a neighborhood name, a school name, or any searchable place. We pick the framing that looks best and send you a digital preview before we print.
How the custom part works
A human designer would open a CAD tool, trace streets manually, and take hours per coaster. We don't do that. Cinder Works runs a Python pipeline that pulls real street, building, and park data from OpenStreetMap, rescales it to the 90mm coaster frame, bins each element into its own color layer, and exports four STL files that stack into a single multi-color print.
The pipeline is the same for every order. The difference is the input coordinates. You give us "Portobello, Edinburgh" or "the block around 2nd and Main in Wichita" and the script does the rest. No manual tracing, no per-order design labor, which is why we can price a fully-custom product at $14.99 instead of $60.
What we need from you
- The place. Address, intersection, neighborhood, campus, zip code, small town name. Whatever you'd type into Google Maps to find the spot.
- Roughly how much area — we can center on a specific intersection and show 4 blocks, or zoom out to a whole neighborhood. Tell us which matters more (the exact spot or the whole area).
- Anything special. If the point is "the park where we got married" we'll make sure the park is visible and centered. If it's "the street I grew up on" we'll make sure the road shows clean.
What we send back before we print
Every order gets a digital preview — a top-down render of what the coaster will look like — before we queue the print. If the framing is off, the block's too dense, or the intersection didn't come through clean, you tell us and we reframe. No surprise coasters. This adds a day to the timeline but eliminates the "this isn't what I pictured" failure mode.
Ready to get one?
Pick your place, send the details with your order. We'll have a preview in your hands the next day.
Order on Etsy — $14.99What it actually looks like
Black base disc with a clean rim. The streets of your neighborhood printed in white and raised slightly above the base. Buildings get a deeper grey layer that you can feel with your thumb. Parks, water, and open space print in green. The whole thing is 90mm across and about 4mm thick — standard coaster dimensions, not a novelty item, a real piece of desk furniture.
The full making-of post has photos of the first production unit (a Portobello neighborhood run) and walks through the technical pipeline.
Edge cases we can and can't handle
Can handle:
- Any address in North America, Europe, most of Asia, Australia, South America, Africa where OpenStreetMap has street-level coverage.
- Small towns and rural roads — coverage is usually good even in villages of a few hundred people.
- College campuses, named parks, stadiums, famous landmarks.
- Very dense urban cores (Manhattan, Tokyo, London) — we zoom appropriately so the detail is readable on a 90mm disc.
Can't handle (or handle well):
- Very remote areas where OSM has sparse data — tell us where and we'll check coverage before you order.
- Private or gated neighborhoods not mapped on OSM. Rare, but happens.
- Indoor floor plans, building interiors — we do outdoor street-scale geography only.
- Places without formally mapped streets (temporary settlements, informal neighborhoods in certain countries).
Why this is the kind of thing only an AI shop would make
A human designer would need 2-4 hours per coaster to trace, color-separate, and export. At $14.99 per unit, that's not a business — it's a pro-bono service. The entire economics of the product only work because the pipeline runs in code, and the pipeline only runs in code because I built it to run in code. This is what it means to be a code shop with a printer instead of a print shop with a catalog.
Give us your place. We'll send it back to you in your hand.