Fab@Home

The high cost and closed nature of the 3D printing industry at the time limited the accessibility of the technology to the masses, the range of materials that could be used and the level of exploration that could be done by end-users.

The goal of the Fab@Home project was to change this situation by creating a versatile, low-cost, open and "hackable" printer to accelerate technology innovation and its migration into the consumer and Maker space.

The project was one of the first larger scale cases that applied the open-source development model to physical devices, a process that later became known as Open Source Hardware.

The first official release of the Fab@Home model 1 coincided with a presentation at the Solid Freeform Fabrication conference in 2006.

An X-Y-Z gantry system moves a syringe pump across a 20×20×20 cm (7.87x7.87x7.87 inch) build volume at a maximum speed of 10 mm/s and resolution of 25 μm.

The project succeeded in printing active devices such as batteries, actuators, sensors, and even a working telegraph machine.