Toronto company wants to put a 3D printer in every home
One Toronto based company aims to bring 3D printing to households everywhere.
Over the past 9 months Panda Robotics has been designing and building a prototype 3D printer, a prototype they hope will make 3D printing as easy and accessible as plain old 2D printing — and at the prices they’re offering on their Kickstarter campaign they just might do it.
“We wanted something that looked really good on our desks, that just worked — like a regular 2D printer.” -Liav Koren, Lead Designer, Panda Robotics
If you’re not familiar with 3D printing, it’s a process used to make three dimensional solid objects. A 3D printer creates the desired physical object by adding layer upon layer of liquid, powder, or sheet material. You can think of 3D printing in LEGO terms, the difference being that it’s a robotic device creating and placing the bricks, or layers in this case, in order to create the finished object — incidentally, printing small simple objects, like LEGO bricks, on a 3D printer is quite possible too.
Since the start of the twenty-first century 3D printing has been growing in popularity, being used in the fields of jewelry, footwear, industrial design, architecture, engineering and construction, automotive, aerospace, dental and medical industries, education, geographic information systems, civil engineering, and many others. Here at Sync we’ve been watching closely as 3D printing has been employed recently to aid a young girl with a rare congenital disorder, provide an injured eagle with a replacement beak, create replicas of unborn children and to tackle printing precise and dangerous parts for devices such as firearms.
Unfortunately the price of 3D printers has kept the entire process out of reach for most households. The last few years have seen costs drop and accessibility go up dramatically. But due to calibration complexities, an imposing learning curve and costs that have remained high when compared to other consumer electronics, 3D printers haven’t yet made the transition from industry factory and enthusiast workshop to the common household desktop.
Panda Robotics has designed their PandaBot with the goals of eliminating the need for any time-consuming calibration process and reducing the cost of the printer, while at the same time providing a stable, robust, quiet and great looking machine that will feel at home on anyone’s desk. They believe they’ve met these ambitious goals with their prototype PandaBot and are ready to take the next step with the financial help of a Kickstarter campaign.
Kickstarter is a popular crowd-funding site where anyone can offer their financial support to creative projects in return for reward levels allowing them to become venture capitalists of sorts from the comfort of their own home. Each project sets a financial goal and if through pledges this goal is reached the project is considered funded, backers are charged their pledge amount and are rewarded based on their pledge level. In the case of Panda Robotics, they’ve set a goal of $50,000 which they require to place component orders at scale, set-up tooling, and establish strong relationships with manufacturing partners. In order to reach this goal Panda Robotics is offering a number of reward levels — the sweet spot being at $800 where backers will “Get a PandaBot! – One first-edition PandaBot in Fur White, along with a Panda Robotics logo t-shirt and logo sticker.”
Currently the Toronto-based company is well on their way to reaching their $50,000 goal, having raised over $30,000 in the first week of the campaign. If you’re interested in supporting the project, perhaps even securing yourself a PandaBot by February next year, head on over to their Kickstarter page before November 23rd when the funding ends. For more information check out the video below of Lead Designer, Liav Koren discussing the PandaBot project.
A general purpose 3D printer would be a boom to artists, architects, builders, 3D reference materials for the furniture trade. It really is a nearly limitless list of possibilities.
Unfortunately, the general public who might buy a 3D printer has no idea how to accomplish or how to think in three dimensions even though that is exactly what we live. I imagine that a lot of printers will lay dormant after a few weeks (if that) of frustrated use.
Material costs are another issue. Then there are issues with mixing and matching materials where some powdered metals are toxic and to breathe ferrous oxide is highly dangerous. What if you’ve printed a metallic image, and later your kid pours some editable materials into the printer to make a cookie which is now contaminated with metallic powder. So there are safety concerns that most people do not know or think about.
Gotta love tech there is so much endless fun.
I think the Pandabot, much like the makerbot and other 3D printers aimed at the home and enthusiast market only print using plastic-based polymers, so toxicity isn’t likely to be a problem. As for edible materials – I don’t think that’s even an option :-)
I’d totally put icing in it, or perhaps Spam.
Phil,
We’re really interested in icing as a material and are exploring it for the future.
Panda,
The reason I mentioned edible materials is because you mentioned entering the general public domain. There was no clarification as to what exactly Panda has in mind. I have seen 3D printers printing with edible substances to make intricate patterns in of course 3D. Below are two examples of culinary 3D printing, there are also better examples but these should suffice.
It should be obvious that the same printing heads using plastics or metallic materials will not be suitable for edible materials. But some others seem to need simplicity as they have a hard time reading and understanding the English language, making intelligent critical thinking too difficult.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy3Oy5mmMiA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=BIFi8but3Vw
I do applaud your endeavours and wish you ultimate success.
As Simon mentioned, the PandaBot prints with ABS plastic, so there are no issues regarding powdered metals.
In terms of thinking in 3D, there are some great tools out there that are easy to grasp. We’re big fans of MeshMixer as a tool that’s easy to get into with a reasonably approachable metaphor. OpenSCAD is another great tool, especially if you have a coding background.
@Phil…With all due respect I think your assumptions about the ability of the general public to be able to grasp 3D printing comes off as a little arrogant.
The spate of smart phones and tablets and other such items in the hands of the general public has proven that applications for the things the ‘gizmos’ (a general public term…) can do can be handled, employed and enjoyed by all. we will just find ways to adapt and enhance our lives with these new printers.
I am sure you did not mean to sound so cavalierly callous?
Maagsmae, of course Phil meant to sound that way. Have you read any of his other posts on the Sync Blog?
I’m not sure why Phil deserves your respect, or of anyone else for that matter. Is it because he is a 20-something blowhard with a superiority complex, who lives in his parents’ basement and never misses a Dr. Who marathon? Maybe if he had some female companionship, he wouldn’t find it necessary to be the first person to post a comment on nearly every story.
Get a life, Phil, and please remove your picture. You look like a dork.
Cyberbullying is still bullying, and what you posted crossed the line. If you have a difference of opinion with Phil, by all means, state your case, but personally attacking another commenter, especially when they have said nothing to or about you, is totally uncalled for.
Pseudonymous trolling isn’t particularly funny, brave or interesting.
I’ve heard enough horror stories from friends who did tech support in the late ’90s to know just how willfully ignorant a lot of people can be, that it’s not that much of a stretch to suggest that the mass consumer may not yet be ready for such a device.
Smartphones and tablets are polished mass consumer devices and things like (for example) the iPhone have been deliberately locked in a ‘walled garden’ in large part to prevent the end user from doing any permanent harm to their device through accidental misuse. And I’m not even saying that as a tech snob: good technology _should_ be aimed at the mass consumer, and should be designed in such a way as to be intuitive and simple for the end user to use as possible. Therein lay Steve Jobs’ genius.
It’s arguable whether the mass consumer market is ready for (or even needs) a 3D printer at this stage: I could certainly make use of one, but I wouldn’t say tech geeks are the ‘average’ person by any stretch of the imagination. That being said, the best chance of success a new technology has is developing a product which is not only easy to use, polished, and intuitive, but it ultimately has to be under a certain price-point for the lay consumer to take the plunge into unknown territory. And even then, the bleeding edge tech is always first adopted amongst hobbyists, gadget geeks, etc. before the tech matures sufficiently to become that polished tech that can also be manufactured in sufficient bulk amounts to reduce costs and to maximize efficiency of manufacturing, distribution, etc.
First adopters will be willing to shell out $800, but the mass consumer will not: they’ll likely be looking in the $100-$200 range, maybe $300 if it’s a product that has some brand name cachet (eg. if Apple made a 3D printer, you can bet it would be way more likely to sell, even if the consumer didn’t really need one; such is the power of brands).
Also, a 3D printer that creates edible goodies would be awesome. Phil should go patent that, stat.
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