3Doodler

Corsair drawn with 3Doodler

The 3Doodler is a 3D pen developed by Peter Dilworth and Maxwell Bogue of WobbleWorks LLC. 3Doodler began funding in February 2013 on the crowd funding platform Kickstarter. It utilizes plastic thread made of either acrylonitrile butadiene styrene ("ABS") or polylactic acid ("PLA") that is melted and then cooled through a patented process while moving through the pen, which can then be used to make 3D objects by hand.[1] The 3Doodler has been described as a glue gun for 3D printing because of how the plastic is extruded from the tip, with one foot of the plastic thread equaling "about 11 feet of moldable material".[2]

Kickstarter campaign

WobbleWorks developed a Kickstarter campaign for the 3Doodler on March 25, 2013 with an initial fundraising target of $30,000. The $50 reward level was the minimum needed to receive the product, with higher reward levels of $75 and $99 including more bags of plastic thread, and the highest level of $10,000 including a "membership in the company’s beta testing program for future products" and the opportunity to spend an entire day with the company's founders, along with the backer's 3Doodler being personally engraved. The reward levels were expanded due to demand, with the added tiers of the product shipping in 2014 rather than in September, October, November or December 2013 for the earlier backers. The company also teamed up with several Etsy wire-artists to showcase the abilities of the 3Doodler and to create "limited edition art pieces" for the campaign.[3][4]

The fundraising target was reached within a matter of hours and many of the reward levels were sold out within the first day, along with all the Etsy art pieces.[3] By February 22, more than $1 million had been pledged[5], and the final pledge amount exceeded $2 million.

3Doodler 2.0

In 2015, an improved version of the 3Doodler was introduced, and a second fundraising campaign on Kickstarter yielded more than $1.5 million.[6]

References

  1. ↑ Joseph Flaherty (February 19, 2013). "3Doodler Lets You Hand-Draw 3-D Objects". Wired. Retrieved February 23, 2013.
  2. ↑ Staff writer (February 22, 2013). "Pen 'writes' in 3D with plastic". UPI. Retrieved February 23, 2013.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Glen Tickle (February 20, 2013). "People Really Want to Draw in 3D: 3Doodler Crushes Kickstarter Goal in Mere Hours". Geekosystem. Retrieved February 23, 2013.
  4. ↑ Tekla Perry (February 22, 2013). "A Dumb 3-D Printer is a Million-Dollar Idea". IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved February 23, 2013.
  5. ↑ Brandon Griggs (February 21, 2013). "A 3-D pen that lets you draw objects in the air". CNN. Retrieved February 24, 2013.
  6. ↑ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1351910088/3doodler-20-the-worlds-first-3d-printing-pen-reinv/description

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to 3Doodler fabricated objects.