Hong Kong-based Ugee announced a new desktop FFF 3D printer specifically designed for kids: the Funbox.
There have been a few attempts at producing a kid-friendly 3D printer over the past decade, but none seem to have survived. Part of that had to do with the state of the technology — poor — but the lack of success was also due to lousy combinations of features.
The Funbox seems different. It appears to be a system that hits all the right spots:
- Small volume
- Fully automated
- Fully assembled
- Multiple safety features
- Easy content
And it’s pretty cute, too.
Regarding that small volume, I can’t say exactly what it is because the documentation does not really have many specifications. That’s part of the plan here: this is not a normal 3D printer. It’s for kids that are not interested in or able to understand specifications. We can see from the images that the build volume is quite small, perhaps 100 x 100 x 100 mm.
There are lots of safety features, including:
- Fully enclosed system
- Air filtration system (HEPA + activated carbon)
- Several regulatory certificates (unlike most 3D printers)
- International toy safety standards
- Visible heating indicator
The enclosure also includes rounded corners, something no one else thought of for a printer for kids.
The specifications we do know say that the Funbox prints in a very similar manner to other desktop FFF 3D printers: high speed, 0.05mm layers, etc. There are sensors for filament-out, power loss, as you would expect. It seems to be designed to print only PLA material.
For software, Ugee provides a smartphone app and a desktop app. They are able to monitor print progress via a webcam inside the Funbox. Print parameter fiddling is kept to a minimum by providing “Fast, Standard, Fine” quality selections. That should hide a lot of the complexity from children.
For content, ugee provides “AI Shapegen”, which accepts text, voice, and even scribbles as input. It then converts the input into a printable 3D geometry that goes directly to the Funbox printer. That should make it incredibly easy for kids to make many of their own creations.
Finally, there’s the price: US$269, discounted at launch. That’s pretty low and quite competitive with other desktop 3D printers. However, there’s something else interesting here: ugee includes SEVEN spools of filament with the machine.
At first, I thought the spools would be “mini” sized, especially after seeing this graphic of how to load a spool on the tiny 3D printer.
But then they also posted this image of seven spools, which by my eye appears to be 1kg spools. A low price for a 1kg spool of PLA these days is around US$15, so seven spools is a large proportion of the US$269 purchase price.
They seem to have set up a machine that could be of great interest to kids worldwide, and I am very interested to see how this plays out over the next six months.
Via ugee
