TechCrunch - "Devilishly cute"

Financial Post - "Bringing 3D printing to the masses"

Michael Hainsworth, BNN - "I'm impressed by how quiet it is..."

CTV  News Channel - "3D printer becoming affordable"

Matt Ratto, ThingTank Lab - "The PandaBot is a great example of the next generation of 3D printers which build upon the open source hardware 3d printing movement, but bring these technologies to new audiences. It has been designed from the ground up to be safer, more reliable, and easier to use than current price-equivalents. I hope to see wide adoption from a new groups of critical makers."

Being naturally impatient folk, we wanted a 3D printer that not only brought us the future today but that would look great and just work. Since we couldn't find one, we decided to build it.

3D printing has been “the future” for quite a long time but it has still been expensive. 3D printers were targeted at large, high-end manufacturers: when you’re building aerospace parts you can be very expensive and still far cheaper and faster than the competition. Developments in technology, manufacturing techniques, and logistics allow us to sell an advanced printer for the price of a tablet so there really can be one on every desk and in every home. We’re here to shake things up and bring consumer electronics pricing to 3D printing so that the future is now. 

Over the past 9 months we've designed and built our prototype printer. Since it's designed as a manufactured product, construction techniques and materials were chosen to make it exceptionally stable, robust, and quiet. Fully encased in metal, the PandaBot is very rigid and quiet. Our design isn’t as susceptible to vibration induced errors as other printers designed to be hand assembled. We've proven this by going from the back of a taxi to successfully printing on live national TV with no adjustments in less than 5 minutes.

Other printers have a very long and complex initial calibration process to ensure that material is extruded at the proper level and adheres to the printing surface. Many require re-calibration after as few as 2 prints. Thanks to our innovations, the PandaBot is self-calibrating and will print straight out of the box.

We’ve designed the PandaBot to look great. It looks like it belongs on your desk whether you’re an architect, an advertising executive, or an art student. By making a beautiful product we can drag 3D printing out of the batch processing era and make it personal. The only problem is that watching your objects take shape is a little too mesmerizing. Our design team still gets sucked in to watching prints and we’ve had our prototype working in the office for nearly 5 months.

Innovative Design

We didn’t just want to make incremental improvements to available 3D printers, we wanted to revolutionise the industry. Our design and construction process gave us insights into needed improvements.   

We've added hardware innovations that make the PandaBot much easier to use and far more reliable. With a capacitive sensing heated build bed, our printer knows where the head is vertically and automatically calibrates itself in software. This gives you a great print out of the box and every time, with no painfully time-consuming tuning. Our 2 piece design makes it easier to ship, quickly snaps together, and provides an incredibly reliable build platform.

User Friendly Software

We’re focused on taking the complexity out of turning designs into objects. Just as you plug any paper printer into a PC or Mac and click print without worrying about compatibility or PostScript support, we want to bring the same ease of use to 3D printing.

Our software converts STLs (a very common file format for 3D models) into G-code ( a common format describing 3-dimensional paths for mechanical systems like CNC machines and 3D printers) with a few easy settings that allow users to control the production speed and quality of their objects, just like the quality settings for your regular printer. We will still give you the opportunity for more control under an advanced tab and take G-code produced by other software tools if you want to get very experimental.

A number of the available software tools are dauntingly complex for us and can have significant “quirks” with each release. We want to let users focus on their interests and expertise rather than requiring them to master yet another set of complex tools.

Next steps

We're ready to go to production, but we need you!

With your help, we can place component orders at scale, set-up tooling, and establish strong relationships with our manufacturing partners.

Your help will also enable us to go through the necessary regulatory approval processes and certifications.

Specifications

Print envelope: 11"x11"x11" 

Custom heated capacitive-sensing build-bed, 120C maximum temperature
Maximum nozzle temperature: 265C
Works with 1.75mm filament
Layer thickness: 0.1mm 
Maximum speed: 60mm/s
Material: ABS 

USB connection
External international 110/220V power supply
Powder-coated aluminum shell
File format: STL or G-code
Software: Panda Robotics G-code generator or your tool of choice
Platform: Windows, Mac, and Linux