3Doodler: world’s first 3D pen that draws in the air ($1 Million Raised Already!)

3doodle 3d printing pen

Have you ever wanted to draw off of your paper? And I don’t mean onto the desk beneath, but right up into the air. If so, your dreams just came true. Fresh to Kickstarter is the 3Doodler, a pen that literally lets you draw, doodle, and write in 3D.

As long as you start on some surface, you can take your creation right into the third dimension with 3Doodler. Whil its creators are calling it a 3D printing pen, I’m not in agreement with that classification. It is inspired by 3D printing, and it uses the same mechanism as fused deposition modeling, but what makes 3D printing printing is that the motion is machine/computer controlled. The word for manual hand deposition of a substance into words is writing, and if it’s not words, then drawing, sketching, painting, or doodling, but not printing. After all, when my professors told me to print my papers, I knew they weren’t telling me not to write in cursive; they meant use a printer.

Anyway, that rant aside, the 3Doodler is at least appropriately named, and it IS really cool. Small sections of 3mm filament (ABS and PLA) are fed into the back and it’s extruded out the front, cooling quickly enough to do completely vertical lines; a foot of filament will render into about 11 feet of doodling. Even 2D drawings can be be lifted and stood up, or combined, making stencils incredibly useful. It can also be used to repair and weld together other plastic things, so those with a real 3D printer may want a 3Doodler if not just for that. There are two speeds; fast for filling in, and slow for detail, and pressing both buttons simultaneously will back the filament out, which is useful for changing colors.


When I first saw this campaign today, it was already at $90,000 of a $30,000 goal. It’s now at $273,000, $20,000 of which occurred while I was writing this, and there are 33 days left. This may be one for the record books. You can still lock one in at $75, but I’d move quickly.

Kickstarter project page

  • Xan

    Surely this is a ‘HOT GLUE GUN’.

    Now I am pretty sure that Bostik, or who ever invented the hot glue gun technology, wil have soemthing to say about this.

    Just look at the way that 3D Systems reacted to Formlabs.

    Hmmm!

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