Mini Mobile: A Robotic Pocket Printer That Will Drive Your Cat Crazy Beth Snyder April 17, 2014 Extras At least twice a day I find myself wanting to print something and I can’t. The printer is hooked up to the desktop in the office at one end of the house, while I am using my laptop at the other end. So I have to either save what I want to print to a flash drive and walk it down there, or I have to send myself an email so I have what I need when I get to the other machine. Or, worse, I’ll be on my phone and want to print something. It’s infinitely more frustrating. I’ve been looking into portable printers, but they’re bulky and really don’t have very good quality unless you spend more than my budget allows. The Mini Mobile Robotic Printer is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, and I really hope it makes it. The folks at Zuta Labs decided to look at what a printer really does and simplify it down to its base function: writing out information from a screen to paper. All you have to do is position it at the top of a piece of paper, and it scrolls itself across the page printing out the information you need. If you’re printing more than one page, all you have to do is place it on a fresh piece of paper and it’s printing again. Neat, huh? But a word of warning: If you have a cat who likes to hang out near you while you’re working, odds are really good he’s going to end up batting this thing around. I mean, it’s a moving object, right? My boys would’ve had a field day with it. Sure, it’s pretty slow… the Mini Mobile prints barely over a page a minute. But it’s about the size of a coffee cup (10 centimeters high and 11.5 centimeters in diameter) and can be used pretty much anywhere there’s a mostly flat surface. A single inkjet cartridge is supposed to last for about 1000 pages and its battery should last for about an hour. It does have an on/off switch to conserve its battery when not in use, and it is charged via USB. And there’s no more worrying about what size paper you’ve got, because it works with any of them. Its interface will support Android, iOS, Windows, OS X, and Linux, and it connects to your devices via Bluetooth. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dv2sLNikI4] The Kickstarter funding period for the Mini Mobile runs through May 10, and they’re really close to making it already. A pledge of $200.00 US or more will get you one in black ($220 US for white), with expected delivery in June 2014. Source: FastCo.Design Share This With The World!
