OMG! I’ve just backed OLO Kickstarter campaign!

Yes, I did it… I have bought OLO on Kickstarter… Although, the word “bought” is too much – I just have paid and I’m waiting for delivery of my 3D printer. Supposedly, it will happen in September – just before my birthday. In my own company I was called a “looser” or “sucker” and they also said something about throwing money down the drain… Rats! The funniest in this situation is that that I really don’t believe in that, that I will see working OLO. Or maybe we aren’t right?

Łukasz has written about it recently. This device may revolutionise 3D printing for consumers or will be a total disaster. Or the next M3D, 3Doodler, Formlabs or Buccaneer.

For now, the campaign on Kickstartes has chance to rock the reckord o Micro in cathegory of the 3D printer of 2014. The Americans from M3D gained than 3,4 mln $, what is now the 4th plase in the cathegory of technologies and th 20th in the history of Kickstarter. 27 days of the campaign is still before them. They gained an assumed minimum of 80 thousand $ fafter the first 33 minutes of the campaign.

Łukasz wrote about the advantages of the device – it’s small and extremely cheap (costs 99$). It prints from light hardened resins, usnig light emited by… smartphone! Comunication with 3D printer is mobile, you can manage with library of 3D prints, put them on the workbed etc. From the mechanic side, OLO is really simple. It has only one engine which lifts the workbed. The whole secret is in the software – which can be succesful or hopeless.

Putting aside, if it will work – what we will know after sometime, its obvious, that some things don’t look and don’t work like in commercials. Example below. After printing a user of a 3D printer grabs his model and tries to remove it from the workbed with a putty knife. Can you see a glove on his hand? I can’t see it…

Anyway, in another movie presenting the process of 3D printing from rein, you can see, how the model floats in it. Why? Because it’s specific for 3D printing from resins.

In other words, when you remove your model from your 3D printer, it will be still covered with not hardened resin, which is usually sticky and leaves spots, which are hard or impossible to remove, and it should’t come into contact with digestive or respiratory system. The creators of OLO have solution for it – put your 3D print into tap water…

As far as I know, 3D prints from resins should be put into isopropyl alcohol, but maybe the Italians from Solido3D have revolucionised SLA/DLP technology?

A bath of 3D prints printed on The Form 1+

A postprocessing is not the only one nuance, which seem to be controversial for me. An average time of 3D printing will last 1-3 hours – I can’t imagine, that someone will use a smartphone to do it, when he uses it everyday. Solido3D  has just put the costs of hardware on users – they will decide which king of device he will use to do it, and if he will use it to communicate or he will use his old smartphone or even buy a new one.

The next matter – typical Kickstarter’s scenes with children. We still don;t know if children can cane into contact with 3D prints printed in FDM technology from ABS or PLA and the idea to play with 3D prints from resins seems to be very tenuous…

So why, after all of these hesitations, have I decided to buy (order) OLO? Primo – becuase theoretically it may work and be more or less functional. Secundo – it’s cheap. It costs 99$ and we’re still talking about a 3D printer! If it costed 2-3 times more, a lot of people and I wouldn’t have decided to do it. Not because I can’t afford it, but because of the fact, that Solido3D has determinated a psychological price cap of its device perfectly.

Anyway… I keep my fingers crossed. Maybe I won’t wait for it as long, as for Zortrax Inventure… or as long as my friend has been waiting for his Peachy Printer. I hope that I won’t waint as customers waited for Buccaneer…