3Doodler 3D Printer Review

In February of this year, the Boston company WobbleWorks presented on Kickstarter a draft 3D printer in the form of a pen, which allows you to draw with plastic and create three-dimensional shapes called 3Doodler . The campaign ended in deafening success - instead of the expected 30 thousand dollars, more than 2 million were raised. About the project several times they wrote on Habré - in fact, from this article I learned about it and managed to order one of the first.

Today the device is finally delivered. Under the cut - a few photos and subjective sensations obtained in half an hour of use.
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Postage took 3 weeks - from October 24 to November 11. The campaign organizers were able to meet all delivery dates, for which they thank you very much. The box was very discreetly wrapped with a film that looked like a bubble wrap, and the box was almost unbeaten.


(pictures are clickable)

Inside - a simple, but quite nice box of good-quality cardboard, about 30 x 10 x 7 cm. It weighs about 700 grams. On the top cover - a drawing of the device, on the sides - various illustrations in the same minimalist style. The serial number is stuck on the bottom - perhaps it will be useful for something.



On top of the box is a manual and plastic that refills the pen. There were quite a lot of them in my package - 5 packs of 25 sticks each in 15 different colors, very similar to children's sets with clay.



3Doodler can print in two types of plastics - ABS and PLA . As far as I understood from the explanations of the authors of the campaign, ABS is more rigid and suitable for 3D drawing, and PLA is more viscous and it is more convenient for them, for example, to apply multi-colored patterns on the glass. I had ABS plastic.

Inside the box are the adapter and pen.



Adapter - nothing special. Normal Chinese. The wire could have been more genuinely done - a bit uncomfortable. But the handle design is quite entertaining. In the widest place, it reaches about 3-4 cm and weighs about 300 grams.



On the “upper” side there are two control buttons, an LED and a small fan. Below is a bracket for the bracket, a socket for some connector (in the documentation is called the “3-pin control port”) and a switch.



The switch simultaneously performs the role of plastic selection - for ABS and PLA, at least, different heating temperatures are required. After being turned on to the 3Doodler network, it “warms up” for a while, showing a red indicator - it takes about a minute for it to come into working condition. After that, you can refill the plastic and start typing.



Drawing 3Doodler'om is very different from drawing with an ordinary pen. Very unusual. Two buttons on the handle select the plastic feed rate - faster or slower. The hand needs to be led at a constant speed, otherwise the plastic is stretched or crushed.

You can paint on almost any surface. I planted a notebook — the plastic was slightly sticking to the paper so that it could be fixed, but it just as easily departed. Before sharp turns, it is better to slightly “push” the handle into the paper so that the plastic locks in this place and does not bend.

Plastic consumed pretty quickly. The first 5-10 minutes I did not even try to draw something meaningful, drove a pen on the paper and watched the plastic stick to the paper. Then he finally grew bolder and tried to make a cube.



Drawing four faces on paper was pretty easy. But then combine them together - almost unreal. Two hands on this is clearly not enough. It is necessary that someone one held the parts to be joined, and the other - the handle. Somehow having attached three sides to each other, I killed ten minutes to join the fourth - and nothing happened. Damned piece of plastic constantly fell out of the hands, wrinkled under a hot tip, or disconnected.

Desperate to attach the last facet, I decided to try to just hold the two connecting lines through the air. This is much more difficult than the guys in the official video show - plastic bends under its own weight, and it’s much more difficult to calculate the feed rate than on paper. The result was the ugliest cube in the history of the fine arts:



After the end of the work, the plastic should be removed. To do this, you need to press both buttons simultaneously, and the stub will go in the opposite direction. It took 2/3 of one stick, so it's good that the plastic was sent with a margin.



By the end of the work the pen is pretty hot. Manufacturers write that the metal tip in general should never be touched, since its temperature can reach 200 ° C.

In general, the feelings are mixed. In order to do anything sane, you need a very long time to get used to and train. The skill of drawing with a pen on paper or a pen on a tablet practically does not help to get comfortable. However, the device definitely produces a “wow effect”. Moreover, it is only the “first edition”, as it is written on the box.

The WobbleWorks guys are planning to create a whole ecosystem - on the official website you can already buy additional plastic or place an order for the device itself. I sincerely wish them success!