Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, © Ondřej Tůma 2025, Czech Republic.
The story of a construction set that originated from an idea and evolved into an open system.
This timeline maps the key milestones and events that shaped BitBeam from its beginnings to its present form.
Jason Huggins (USA) introduce Bitbeam constriction set in year 2011. He was inspired by Grid Beam system, which he scaled it down to sizes compatible with LEGO® Technic. Constriction set use 10-32 screws or M4 screws.
Later Jason published small OpenSCAD library for design new pieces, but he stopped with other improvement.
Next set developer was teacher from Polička Tomáš Feltl (CZ). He extend base pieces with lot of special boxes for Arduino boards or other electronic sensors. Next to STL models, he published models for LEGO® design programs. So it was possible to create user guides to build models from this construction set. He add letter m before construction set name for differentiation from original concept.
From this time, constriction set m-BITBEAM is distributed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license, to better financing and project protecting.
Ondřej Tůma (CZ) create bitbeam-lib library for OpenSCAD. It contains a few base modules for pieces designing for BitBeam or m-BITBEAM.
From 2019 Ondřej Tůma works on Git library, which contains pieces sources. It uses bitbeam-lib. First set contains only 12 pieces, and on end of year it contains 30 pieces.
From 2020 is in distribution process of pieces library part for generating online catalog, which contains separated pieces sorted in categories. Pieces have own images and simple description.
There was Egg Bot published on Printables.com. Egg Bot was first free model, build from pieces from OpenSCAD library.
The year 2011 was breakthrough year for construction set. It was extended by many other pieces. At the end of year, there was 196 pieces without pins, shafts or other pieces, which can be used in construction set.
Usual joining element in construction set are screws. Even if Tomáš Feltl design pins, they didn't work well. The new ones can be printed and works good enough. Other support type pieces are shafts.
Huge additional for construction set is track chains system. They have many sizes as like as wheels for chains.
Next to other pieces, construction set are extended with omniwheel which can be fulled 3D printed. Small exception is small tubes, which can be used as bearing in flexible rolls.
Last huge extension in this year was gear wheels with different sizes as well as inner gear wheels which can be printed as parts.
E-Shop GeekZoo.cz be launched for selling the construction set.
In 2024, the construction set returned to its original name BitBeam. With this return, the BitBeam.cc domain was launched, serving as the main hub and promotional website for the entire project.
The parts catalog was expanded with a completely new category – rails with model size 0. This addition now enables building of trains and other models with rail chassis.
At the beginning of 2025, gear wheels underwent a significant improvement. They were moved to a separate category and individual parts received new, clearer names. The construction set was also expanded with a worm gear (worm), and all gear wheels were adjusted to rotate completely symmetrically in worm gear assemblies.
The construction set received its own robotic board ESP32-S3 Robotic Board, which was developed in cooperation with OctopusLab. After a long break, the construction set also successfully presented itself at Robotic Day 2025, where it demonstrated its potential. As a complement to this event, a special robotics kit was added to the e-shop offering.