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Printing a Pollution Hunter: How Our PETG Helped Build Agami

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See how PrintIn3D's black Bambu Lab PETG helped Heron Labs 3D print the hull of Agami — a semi-autonomous boat that traces pollution sources in Irish rivers.

Shreevats Shreevastav

9/7/20262 min read

River pollution hunter 3d printed PETG Agami - Source : https://darraghevanson.com/agami

Nearly half of Ireland's rivers are in unsatisfactory ecological condition, and one of the hardest parts of fixing that is a simple question: where is the pollution actually coming from? Manual sampling and fixed monitoring stations only tell you so much. So when a team of young engineers set out to build a boat that could go and find out for itself, we were proud to help get it on the water.

Meet Agami

Agami is a semi-autonomous water-quality monitoring vessel built by Heron Labs, a four-person startup formed during the 2026 Patch Summer Program at Dogpatch Labs. Rather than waiting for water to come to a sensor, Agami navigates along a river and continuously measures four key indicators — nitrate concentration, electrical conductivity, turbidity, and temperature. Every reading is GPS-tagged and streamed live to a web app over LTE, so the team can watch the numbers change as the boat moves and pinpoint exactly where conditions shift. In other words: it doesn't just detect pollution, it helps trace it back to the source.

The final version (V3) came in at 402 × 250 × 99.5 mm, driven by differential thrust from two submersible pumps and built to scale toward river surveys of around 10 km over a ~12-hour run.

Why PETG — and why it mattered here

A boat is an unforgiving test for a 3D-printed part. It sits in moving water, carries sensitive electronics, and has to hold its shape run after run. The Heron Labs team chose PETG specifically for its low water absorption compared with PLA — the right call for anything that lives on, or in, the water. The hull was designed for manufacturability and split into three sections so each piece fit cleanly on the Bambu Lab P2S build plate.

This is exactly the kind of job PETG is made for, and it's a good reminder that 3D printing isn't only for display models and prototypes-that-stay-on-a-desk. Printed correctly in the right material, parts go out into the real world and do real work.

Where we came in

We sponsored the project in kind with 2 kg of black Bambu Lab PETG — the material the hull was printed in. On a build like this, the bottleneck usually isn't the design, it's the wait: iterating through three physical versions means a lot of printing, and every day spent waiting on filament is a day the project stalls.

Because the team could collect filament from us the same day, they kept their iteration loop tight and moved from V1 to a working V3 without losing momentum. As project lead Darragh Evanson put it, the sponsorship "sped up our iteration speed greatly by allowing same-day collection." That's the part we're happiest about — not the spool itself, but the time it gave them back.

The result

Heron Labs demonstrated a fully integrated platform — sensors, LTE communication, GPS tracking, and autonomous waypoint navigation — at the Patch 2026 demo day. It's an impressive piece of engineering with a real environmental purpose, and we're delighted a little of it was printed on our filament.

You can read the team's full technical write-up of the build here: The Agami Project by Darragh Evanson »

Building something that needs to survive the real world?

Whether it's a watertight enclosure, a functional prototype you need to iterate on quickly, or a batch of parts in a material that can take some punishment, we can help. We stock and print PETG and a range of other materials, and — as Heron Labs found — we're set up for fast turnaround when your project can't afford to wait.

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