XY One.
Sub-20 nm incremental movement
Made affordable
Nothing to assemble.
We have said all along that nanometre-scale motion shouldn't cost a fortune. Here is the proof.
XY One is a complete XY positioning stage printed as one single piece of plastic. Nothing to align, nothing to grease, nothing to assemble. You lift it off the print bed, bolt on two motors, and it moves.
Fig. 2 — The raw print on the bed, layer by layer. No motors, no lead screws, no electronics: everything on screen here comes off in one piece.
It bends instead of sliding.
The rectangular slide holder is carried by folded flexure beams and nothing else. Each drive block is tied to the frame by 0.5 mm blades that bend, so it travels in a straight line along its own lead screw and resists every other direction. There is no friction to overcome, no backlash to unwind and nothing to shim into alignment by hand.
That is the trade the stage makes. Give up long travel, and precision stops being a machining problem. It becomes a printing problem — and printing is cheap.
Detail A — Blades printed at 0.5 mm wall thickness, cycling against their own datum outline. Only the blades bend; the 2.4 mm motor-mount walls and every block are rigid. Deflection is exaggerated by roughly four thousand times.
Moves in Nanometers
Under optical tracking the stage resolves individual increments below 20 nanometres — roughly one four-thousandth the width of a human hair — against a measurement noise floor of 0.6 nanometres. The smallest increment it repeats dependably, move after move, is 210 nanometres. Both numbers belong to a machine built for the price of a good pair of shoes.
Fig. 1 — Live simulation of the F2R-XY-01 slide holder seeking random targets inside its travel envelope. The holder moves on both axes; each drive block and its hardware travel only along their own lead screw, and the 0.5 mm blades bend to take up the difference. Frame, base and motors are rigid. Displacement against the datum outline is magnified roughly 4,000×.
Measured, not modelled.
Every number on this page came off the bench. A marker on the slide holder, filmed at 20 frames per second and tracked frame by frame against a calibrated scale. Two runs from that work are below.
Notes
- Sub-20 nm individual increments optically resolved, against a 0.6 nm measurement noise floor.
- Minimum reliably repeatable increment is currently 210 nm, at 25 microsteps per command.
- Single-microstep commands resolve below 20 nm but do not yet repeat: 15 per cent land dead, and a quarter reverse.
- All figures are from video tracking. Independent interferometric validation is the next step.
Not the finest. The cheapest by three orders of magnitude.
A piezo stage will out-resolve us by a factor of fifty. A bearing stage will out-travel us by a factor of four. Neither of them comes off a print bed for the price of lunch, and that is the whole argument.
| Stage | Travel | Fine motion | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| F2R-XY-01 |
3 × 3 mm | <20 nmresolved; 210 nm repeatable | ₹1,500≈ $15.60 |
| Thorlabs NFL5DP20 |
5 mm20 µm piezo | 20 nmopen loop; 10 nm on the −S | ≈ $945+ driver |
| Newport 9062-XY-NP-M |
12.7 mm | <30 nmmin. incremental motion, Picomotor axis | On request |
| Newport NPXY100 |
100 µm | 0.2 nmopen loop | ≈ £3,854+ amplifier |
| Newport NPXY200SG |
200 µm160 µm closed | 4 nmclosed loop; 0.4 nm open | ≈ £6,577+ amplifier |
in materials
The XY stage costs about ₹1,500 to build. That is $15.60 in materials.
In less time than it takes to fill in a quotation form for a commercial stage, you could be doing real positioning work on an F²R.
Scanning samples under a microscope. Aligning optics. Building instruments nobody has thought of yet.
The hard part of nanopositioning was never the physics. The hard part was affording it.
From a simple microscope to a nanometre-scale stage
The XY stage began as a low-cost microscope for teaching and research. It grew into something more ambitious: an instrument precise enough for photonics, metrology and micro-fabrication, yet cheap enough to sit on a school bench.
And no, it is not a toy. It is our first step towards putting deep-tech instruments within reach of the people who need them.
The things people ask.
How can a 3D print position to 20 nanometres?
Because nothing slides. The stage moves by bending 0.5 mm blades of plastic, and a blade under load deflects by an amount set by its geometry, not by its surface finish. Layer lines and printer tolerance would wreck a sliding bearing; they barely matter to a flexure. Precision moves from the machine shop into the CAD file, and CAD is free.
What is the difference between resolved and repeatable?
Resolved means we can see the stage make a move that small: individual increments below 20 nm show up cleanly above a 0.6 nm measurement noise floor. Repeatable means you can ask for that increment and get it every time. Today that number is 210 nm. The gap between the two is honest work still to be done, and it is why both numbers are on this page.
How far does it travel?
About 3 mm on each axis. That is the trade a flexure makes: the blades have a finite elastic range, and pushing past it costs you linearity long before it costs you the part. If you need centimetres, you want a bearing stage.
How was it measured?
Video tracking. A marker on the slide holder, filmed at 20 fps and tracked frame by frame against a calibrated scale, with sub-pixel centroid fitting. Independent interferometric validation is the next step, and until that is done every figure here should be read as tracker-derived.
What do I need to build one?
A printer that can hold a 0.5 mm wall cleanly, two small stepper motors with drivers, a microcontroller, and the screws and lead screws in the bill of materials. Print, bolt on the motors, flash the firmware. There is no assembly step in between, because there is nothing to assemble.
Can I buy one instead of printing it?
Not yet, but tell us what you need it for. Pre-orders, pilot builds and collaborations all go to the same inbox, and a human answers.
Something not answered here? Send it over — this list grows from real questions.
Take the files.
XY One is open source. The repository below is where the project lives, and it fills out as each part of the build is cleaned up and documented. Clone it, print it, drive it past where we stopped — and tell us what breaks.
github.com/atharvdubey22ug-glitch/XY-Stage-files
If you build one, we want to see it.
Contact us
Collaborations, pre-orders, questions about the characterisation, or an application we haven't thought of. A human reads every message, and answers quickly.
atharvdubey.nj@gmail.com
+91 81092 85020
github.com/atharvdubey22ug-glitch/XY-Stage-files
Supported by an equity-free grant from
,
the Frugal Founder’s Fund.
© 2026 F²R — Fiction to Reality. Datasheet Rev. 01 · Monolithic XY Stage / F2R-XY-01. F²R figures obtained by video-tracking characterisation and may vary between builds.