NANOTECH2DAY: The pocket printer that travels across the page

The pocket printer that travels across the page

Printer design hasn’t seen many great changes over the years and in terms of portability, it’s been left on the desk. Now ZUtA Lab’s Kickstarter campaign is looking to raise funds to bring its pocket friendly portable printer into the commercial market. The Mini Mobile Pocket Printer is a small ‘pocket-sized’ device that allows you to print from any device (laptop, tablet, smartphone, you name it!).

[Image courtesy of ZUtA Labs]

The project began at the team’s college, the Jerusalem College of Technology, in the Friedberg Entrepreneurship Program. They succeeded in producing a new technological idea along, with a sound business plan, which won them a grant. Now, they’ve turned to crowd-funding source Kickstarter to help raise a further $400,000 to help get their product out to the commercial markets.

The Pocket Printer is essentially printhead that you would find in desktop printers, however, they have completely rid of the need for the rest of the printer components by making the printhead self mobile with an omni-wheel sytem. This allows the printer to travel across a page, turning and driving in any direction. This feature, means that paper size is no limiting factor here; the printer can print on A4, A3 or any non standard size piece of paper.

[Image courtesy of ZUtA Labs]

Just slide open the hatch at the bottom to reveal the inkjet and then line up the corner of the comprehensible design with the corner of the paper and you’re ready to print away. The solution offers great potential for on site engineers and architects for example, who are constantly on the move and prefer hard copies of blueprints and specs over digital files alone.

[Image courtesy of ZUtA Labs]

The printer is of course battery powered- lithium polymer type – which offers 1 hour of printing time and can be fully recharged in 3 hours with the use of a Micro USB cable. Connectivity is provided through Bluetooth, allowing phones, laptops, tablets or any Bluetooth enabled device to send files to be printed.

The first version will offer grey-scale printing only and can reportedly print 1.2 pages-per-minute. The inkjet can provide enough ink for 1000 pages before needing replacement. The quality of the prototype clocks in at 96×192 dpi, with the final product promising higher resolution.

The device weighs in at 300g and measures 10 centimeters high and 11.5 centimeters in diameter. The polycarbonate shell will come initially in two different colours – Mars Black and Titanium White.