Popular 3D printer vendor has come up with a foldable portable concept that's mindblowing

Anycubic’s latest innovation could redefine what users expect from portable 3D printers, and has already won the iF Design Award 2025, but the company has offered no official launch date.

Lol of course they haven't, this is a concept idea with probably zero engineering hours put in to it yet. This is their designers thinking "ooh, this would be super neat!" And their marketing team going "fuck yeah!"

I mean, I agree, if they can pull it off, it is super neat
- Those darn lazy engineers. I mean the entire thing is basically done as you can see from the picture!
  Those darn engineers just have to put it in that box and make it move, what's the big deal. Slowpokes
It looks a lot like a typical robotic arm used in manufacturing. A quick Google shows that there are a number of desk mounted versions available, but I have no idea what kind of accuracy they offer. It shouldn't be that complicated of a design and since most approaches use encoders things like missteps should be a thing of the past.
I can't see pulling this off at a home user price point without pretty big compromises on positioning accuracy and/or giving up on feedback.
Its going to end up with the the juicearo and google glass theres no way this concept goes anywhere

Assuming every hinge there is motorized, that's 6 servos. That looks like a nightmare to calibrate, which it will need to do a lot of if it's shoved in some backpack for travel on a routine basis.

And the print head looks like a bitch to take apart to service if you get a jam.

Working with 6 axis industrial robots with astonishing repeatability precision, this still wouldn't be enough for a 3D printer
I'm doubting the practical feasibility as well
- Yeah. And those industrial bots you work with are all metal, with high torque motors most likely.
  Meanwhile this thing is going to be using the cheapest servos that can just barely meet the torque requirements, all in a plastic housing arm.
  Gonna stick with my ender 3.
Yeah this thing would suffer really hard from over time degradation and you would have no way to fix it probably. Its like the Iphone of 3D printers. The beauty of 3D printers is exactly that everything is exposed and can be easily modified, repaired or replaced.
Assuming every hinge there is motorized
That image isn't even a mockup of what it could look like, it's probably just some AI generated crap. Those servo joints will never bend around the base to align with the height of it.
Not to mention the vibration of the head caused from a single mount point. The engineerinh to keep anything close to the 0.2mm resolution common on non mobile printers. Will be expensive.
- .2mm would be to little for me. I got my ender 3 pro to .05 and reley on that in my engineering designs
Honestly it's a cool idea to have a portable printer though, and it could be achieved but just differently.
Like what if you just took the basic design of a normal 3d printer, but made it snap apart and back together, and then made those pieces fit into the briefcase?
You'd just need two vertical pillars, one horizontal rod. Then the print bed itself could move in either the x or y dimentions since the print head would be stationary in one direction.
Hope that makes sense but in my head this solution is way more practical even if you needed to do a calibration after each setup.
- Have you seen the Positron printer? Fits in a filament box when it's folded up, and takes just a few minutes to assemble. It's a very cool design.
If you add position sensors to the servos you shouldn't need much calibration after the first go, no?
- Looks like that arm would be a floppy noodle, it wouldn't surprise me if it needs re-calibrating halfway through a print just from temperature changes.

Seems like a genuinely horrible idea

Yup. Even assuming this would actually work as advertised, who would actually buy this over a regular printer?
Like, how often do you run into a situation where you need something 3D-printed while on the go, but simultaneously have enough free time to set this thing up in a protected area and wait a long time for the print to finish? Not to mention that you just happen to have brought with you the proper filament as well.
Furthermore, this thing...:
... doesn't look like it holds regular spools.
... looks like a repairability nightmare.
... would surely be sold at a premium while being worse at everything except portability.
- All else being equal, having a 3d printer I can fold up and put away sounds pretty nice to me. I use mine once or twice a month and I could use that space for other things. Of course, all else is unlikely to be equal.
- A traveling repairman or some other on-the-road professional. Let it go in the hotel overnight and have your print by morning. Or that evening if you set it up in the morning.

That just looks like it's going to wobble like all hell, unless it's ridiculously robust like a manufacturing robot arm.

Nah, but I would expect its price to be in the low 5 figures, maybe 6 figures.

This feels like the right place to link to the Kralyn Positron project which is a compact, open source portable 3D printer.

https://github.com/KRALYN/PositronV3

I started buying parts to make one but haven't taken the time to get any of the machined parts manufactured yet.

This looks very cool, but I feel like its failure modes would be brutal. I've seen some failed prints turn into hairy balls of melted hate, but upside down...I feel like its begging to have a print adhesion failure just break everything.

I imagine there would be a lot of vibration on that arm.

Mean number of propogating errors: 3