An old school garage style startup, Purple Crayon is a new company dedicated to developing and selling consumer personal fabrication technologies. At its core the idea of personal fabrication is to provide anyone the ability to “make stuff” regardless of skills or knowledge. The idea is similar to modern desktop printers, which make it possible for anyone to produce high quality printed material with absolutely no idea how the printer works. Personal fabrication technologies will have an impact on the same scale of the industrial revolution – enabling anyone with a vision to build it, or share with others to build or modify a version of their own.
They’re not shipping a 3D printer yet; in fact, at this time they are only beta-testing a 3-axis positioning system, code-named “Cassius”. This platform could be used to become a CNC mill or even a 3D printer in the future. They expect to be shipping a Cassius kit in June 2009. Watch for it!
Via Purple Crayon
Great news, there is definably a need for general purpose machine like this that is affordable. If such machine is in the hands of 1000’s of people we will begin to see very exciting stuff coming out.
If such a facility could be combined with web based software for design, then many possibilities in customization will be opened up. We are betting on this and building the web tools for this.