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.
The first step on the road to consumer personal fabrication devices is making 3D scanners, printers, and milling machines cheap, popular, and easy to use; so that’s what we’re going to do. Purple Crayon’s first products will be a combination computer controlled milling machines and scanner, designed for use in the home. Keep checking this web site for information on buying one of these units, which will go on sale in April or May of 2009 for under $1,000. We will be using this blog to track our progress and post links of interest on personal fabrication technology – so check back often.
U guys f-in rock keep it up. newsletter????? or just e-mail me when ur
ready to sell theses mills I’M READY!
do you have any spec’s for this yet?
Stephan,
In anticipation for Beta testing the mill just underwent a lot of changes. Each axis was grown by a few inches and a bunch of little things identified in early testing were fixed. We are waiting to hear back on a vendor quote to make sure we can produce the new design before we post initial specs. Should be soon. We are committed to no vaporware – so we wont post specs from our SolidWorks models alone. Instead, we are going to wait until we have a mill running and can post specs measured off a running mill. Also all the pictures on the web site are of our current run of prototypes. We deliberately kept the number of shots of the new design to a minimum. Our plan is to post detailed photos of the new design with the specifications.
Getting back to your question about specs, once we get some of the new version built there are also plans for destructive testing of a few mills testing rigidity, wear, glue strength, drop testing, and just generally trying to measure what it takes to break them. Up until now we have not had any real problems – but then we have been working with the units as prototypes and not doing things like intentionally dropping them on the floor. After destructive testing we plan on updating the specs again to reflect the results the tests, and add suggestions of worst-case usage.