European market of producers of low-budget 3D printers seem to be quite formed and arranged from a few ages. An undisputed leader is Holand, where 3D printers like: Ultimaker, Felix, Leapfrog or Builder are produced. Than: Germany, Italy, UK and Poland; Czech Republic and Portugal also have respected representatives. However, in another European countries 3D printers also play an important role and another companies are trying to be popular. An example of this trend is a Hungarian company CraftUnique, a creator of CraftBot.
Although a lot of our readers don’t know CraftUnique, but it’s surely not a debutant. The first time, then you could have heard about this company, was in the second haft of 2014, in context of victorious campaign on Indiegogo, where a 3D printer CraftBot was promoted. Hungarian tried to collect 40 thousand $, but the final effect exceeded their expectations. The company collected over 245 thousand $ (66 thousand $ more than Zortrax on Kickstarter) and their project was supported by 571 people.
A big working area in quite low price (it depends on a model: 399$ – 496$) and its own software, with useful functions. The first 3D printers came to backers from Indiegogo with a 2 months delay.
The campaign on Indiegogo wasn’t the only one achievement of the Hungarians – in December 2014 their Craftbots came to Swiss MediaMarkts and at the end of this year, 3DHubs reawrded CraftBot the best low-budget 3D printer.
What does this 3D printer offer? It has a classic case made of metal, full-colour, touch LCD screen and heated working bed, movable in Z axis. The price of a device is about 1099 $.
Technical specification:
Now the second version of the device is available – CraftBot Plus. In contrast to the first version, a heating of working bed was corrected. It took a lot of time to heat it and it was problematic to achieve the maximal temperature. It made printing from ABS without BuildTak or Dimafixu impossible but when you used it, it didn’t mean a full success. Anyway, in this version the problem was solved. An interesting function is removable bed, which makes removing of your models easier. Unfirtunatelly, I didn’t find any information about its amtomatic levelling – in an original version the bed was callibrated by hand.
The most interesting matter is its software. You can generate/create supports yourself. A user can generate supports automaticaly and than add/remove them like he wants. It’s known in Formlabs but it’s the first time when I hear about it in FDM (at least in a low-budget version). Moreover, CraftWare has a friendly interface – after cutting and generating of a GCodu, it marks all of the elements of the model with another colour (model, filling, suppiorts, brim, etc.), what enables to correct them easily.
