The form factor of 3D printers, a massive machine that took up a lot of floor space, used to be very limited but recently there has been a lot of talk about desktop printing…. but is that enough. A few enterprising entrepreneurs Max Bogue and Peter Dilworth, have found a way to pack many of the same principles into a hand help device. There creation, the 3Doodler, quickly reached funding on Kickstarter.com and is on track to become the most funded printer ever on that platform (while writing this article the campaign received additional funding that was equal to their original goal).
Handheld and portable the 3Doodler opens up a lot of new possibilities for creations and brings the technology to a whole new market. Anyone who can use a hot glue gun (pretty much anyone who doesn’t require supervision) can now melt ABS plastic and extrude their own creations. Of course this leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The included templates for cool things like the Eifle Tower help, and maybe they have plans to produce more templates, but remember that the items selected for viewing in their video and on the website are hand selected as presumably the best designs to showcase the technology.