SnowPod: One Founder’s Attempt to Put Metal LPBF on the Desk

In 2024, SnowX had built a metal 3D printer small enough to sit on a desk. It printed real metal parts. Yet, as the company’s founder Fangda XU recalls, even its own engineers rarely wanted to use it. That admission is where the story of SnowPod, the company’s new desktop LPBF printer, begins.

SnowX’s original metal 3D printer used wire-fed laser DED (Directed Energy Deposition), and its parts came off needing so much post-processing that it hardly seemed worth switching on. “If we still had to send the parts out for machining,” XU remembers asking, “why not just send the CAD files in the first place?”

It was the first of several moments when the team chose to start over rather than push on. They set the DED machine aside and moved to LPBF for its finer detail, knowing it came with two major challenges of its own: handling loose powder and high cost. The team eventually defined three priorities for a truly desktop metal 3D printer: high precision, powder safety and health protection, and acceptable cost for customers. The journey that followed, through 2025 and 2026, was about rethinking each part of the experience rather than simply making an industrial machine smaller.

A Smaller Laser Spot

What level of precision would make a desktop metal printer genuinely useful? The team looked at what people might want to make if metal printing were available outside a factory: a custom bike component, a lighter case, jewelry or a small tool. They all had something in common: small features, fine details, and high accuracy.

Industrial LPBF systems commonly use laser spots around 80–120 μm, balancing detail with production throughput. That makes sense when machines are built to produce parts at scale. But desktop users may have a different priority: spend a little longer printing, if that means less work afterward.

SnowX chose a 40 μm laser spot for SnowPod: roughly half the size normally used in many industrial systems. They aim to capture finer details and reduce the need for extensive post-processing. The goal was to make the printed result more useful when it came off the machine, not just make smaller features.

Powder Safety & Health: Rethinking Powder Handling from the Ground Up

Precision was only part of the problem. The team still had to consider one of the biggest barriers to bringing LPBF into everyday spaces: powder handling.

In industrial settings, operators are accustomed to working with metal powder and dedicated procedures for pouring, cleaning, sieving and recovery. The founder began looking outside the metal printing industry for inspiration. One unlikely reference was the office photocopier.

Printing and copying technology had spent decades making fine toner powder easier to handle. Rather than requiring users to pour loose toner into a machine, sealed cartridges keep the material contained during normal use.

“If photocopiers can keep their powder inside a cartridge, why should metal printing users have to handle loose powder?” was the question behind SnowPod’s approach.

SnowPod uses 316L stainless steel powder with an average particle size of around 30 μm, within a stated range of 17–53 μm. Instead of requiring users to pour powder directly into the machine, it uses sealed, replaceable cartridges for powder supply and recovery.

The cartridge is only one part of the system. SnowX also integrated powder sieving and recovery into the machine, so unused powder can be collected in recovery cartridges for subsequent prints rather than requiring a separate manual recovery step.

But containing the powder is not the same as addressing every airborne-particle concern. For the team, health protection had to be considered alongside convenience.

SnowPod combines a multi-stage filtration system with real-time PM2.5 monitoring. According to SnowX, the system uses a cyclone for initial separation, dual H13 filters for internal filtration and an H14 filter at the exhaust, with a stated filtration efficiency of up to 99.995% for particles larger than 0.3 μm. A PM2.5 sensor near the upper air outlet monitors particle levels in that area.

Together, these measures reflect a broader design principle: powder handling should be treated as an integrated system, covering material loading, containment, filtration, monitoring and recovery, rather than as a series of tasks left to the user.

The Galvo Detour

Cost was the third challenge. Even relatively affordable LPBF systems could cost around $100,000. SnowX focused on two major cost drivers: the laser source and the galvanometer scanner, or galvo, which steers the laser across the powder bed.

Having developed its own lasers for wire-DED systems, the team saw an opportunity to reduce laser costs. For the galvo, the founder explored a different approach: using a linear-motor gantry to move the laser mechanically, inspired by printers such as Peopoly’s Magneto X.

His engineers doubted that the price of  two linear guides, motors and controllers could ever beat two rotary motors, so he let them build a galvo system as a backup. It turned out to be the better call. The cheapest controller SnowX had used before cost $3,000; after nearly a year of work, the team’s in-house version came close to the cost of the bare PCB.

Easy Removal from the Plate

Even after solving the challenges of printing and powder handling, one stubborn problem remained: the part was still attached to the build plate. The team’s initial solution was a cast saw, but cutting parts off proved too cumbersome. Then one engineer had an idea: if Snowpod could print such fine details, why not make the supports as thin as aluminum foil?

The first test worked. The supports could be crushed between fingers and torn off the plate. But when the team tried them on different parts, they ran into a new problem: the parts wouldn’t come off at all.

The team realized that pulling the entire part at once distributed the force across all the supports, preventing any single one from breaking. The solution was to pull from one side, concentrating the force on individual supports until they broke one after another, almost like opening a zipper.

The thin structures folded and collapsed like paper, inspiring the name Origami-Style supports. The team also found that a simple pair of wire cutters made removal easier and more straightforward.

The design is now part of SnowPath, SnowX’s slicing software, which can automatically generate supports tailored to each model’s geometry, designed to stay stable during printing while making the finished part easier to remove.

It’s a small but telling example of SnowX’s approach: rethinking not just how to make a part, but how to make the entire experience better.

Why Snow?

The name SnowPod draws on the possibilities of snow. The same snow can become a snowman, a castle, a sculpture or something no one has imagined before. The material is simple; what people create with it is not.

That sense of possibility is also the spirit behind SnowX. The company wants to bring the joy of creation to more people by starting with the creator: finding friction in existing experiences, rethinking how things work and making them better.

SnowX is the broader exploration; SnowPod is its first product.

Early-bird reservations for SnowPod are now open on Kickstarter, with the official launch expected in Q4 2026.

Visitors to Formnext can see the machine in person at booth Hall12. G61. With a build volume of 80x80x100mm, SnowX says it wants the printer in the hands of engineers, artists, designers, and makers. For more details, visit SnowX’s Kickstarter here.

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*All Photo Credits: SnowX