Color me highly skeptical of this endeavor, given the touchy nature of today’s 3D printers. All of the printers I’ve seen require a human operator for routine maintenance and mucking about with leveling/settings/print bed issues that would seem to me to preclude the sort of reliability that you’d need to make an actual vending machine work out. But more power to these guys if they can make it work.
Combining the hyper-local convenience of Redbox with cutting edge technology, Dreambox is a vending machine that aims to fuel the 3D-printing revolution from the bottom up.
Dreambox was created by co-founders David Pastewka, Ricard Berwick and Will Drevno, who all met in a mobile application development class and competition at the University of California, Berkeley. Frustrated by their lack of accessible, on-campus 3D printing options and the two- to four-week lead time for online 3D printing services, the trio came up with the idea for a more ubiquitous option.