Among the hundreds of stands at last week’s Maker Faire in Rome there were a lot showcasing new FFF 3D printers. So many, in fact, that although many were introducing innovative technology, it was not easy to catch the passer-by’s attention.
Araknia
, a company from Cassino, in the southern part of the Lazio region (which could possibly make them the southern most 3D printer producer in Italy and thus in Europe as well) did it by presenting a curious concept of a digital drawing board, which used a single slice from a 3D file to make a drawing.
The Araknia team developed the digital drawing board practically overnight. It is not intended as a commercial product to market but rather as something a little different, developed to attract more visitors to their stand and show the new product that they do intend to launch soon: the Mycra[ft] 3D printer.
This innovative start up, founded in May 2014 by seven partners with diversified backgrounds in software and mechanical engineering, electronics and design, has already come a long way, having already been selected by Microsoft for its Biz Spark program for innovative start-ups.
“We love being the southernmost 3D printer manufacturers in Europe”, Marco Ritrivi, the company’s Project Manager, told me when I stopped by their stand in Rome. “This means that the southern Italian market is wide open for us. We intend to position ourselves as a vehicle for knowledge and technology, with the goal of taking to the market products that can stand out, not only for their quality but also for ease of use and accessibility.”
Although still in the prototyping phase, the Araknia Mycra[ft] 3D printer is already comparable to other cartesian H-Bot evolutions of the Prusa I3 RepRap systems, in terms of quality, print volume to printer size ratio, and ease of use. Although, judging by the runaway success of relatively simple 3D creative gadgets such as 3Doodler, the digital drawing board might end up being a commercial success even sooner.
