ugee Enters 3D Printing with the Funbox, a Fully Enclosed FDM Printer Built for Kids and Beginners
ugee, known for its drawing tablets and digital creation tools, is moving into additive manufacturing. The company’s first 3D printer is built specifically for kids aged 4 to 12, though it’s really aimed at anyone who wants a machine that doesn’t require any setup knowledge.
Most consumer FDM printers on the market today are still designed with adult makers in mind. Bed leveling, slicing software, and exposed nozzles heated to hundreds of degrees are hardly kid-friendly. The Funbox is ugee’s attempt to build something for the gap between “toy” and “maker tool.” Something that is safe enough to leave a child alone with it, simple enough that they don’t need an adult to use it, and interesting enough to hold their attention past the first print.
Safety First: A Sealed Chamber and Real Filtration
The Funbox’s print chamber is fully enclosed, keeping curious fingers away from the hot end. Most open-frame printers in the same price range have the print head and heated bed exposed during the entire print job.
The exhaust system is the other piece of it. You can breathe easy thanks to a 6010 fan, described by ugee as the largest in its class, that drives a built-in filtration system. ugee says it captures up to 99.5% of airborne particles as small as 0.1 microns, cutting down on the ultrafine particles and smell that come off melting PLA. The whole setup has also been validated against UL GREENGUARD, ASTM F963-23, EN71, and EN62115, the certifications parents and schools tend to check for before letting a device run near kids. A heating-status indicator lights up during filament swaps or calibration too, so nobody reaches in while it’s still hot.
Ease of Use: No Leveling, No Calibration
Having a kid go from unboxing the printer to starting their first print is not something most beginner-friendly printers can offer. The Funbox ships fully assembled: no bed leveling, no screws, no manual calibration. ugee claims a child can go from opening the box to starting a print in around six minutes, with setup and pairing handled through a companion app.
Once the printer is up and running, printing is as easy as pressing a button: pick a model, hit print, and let it cook. Under the hood, ugee offers three slicing presets, fast, standard, and fine, so the same machine can serve a five-year-old printing a toy and a teenager chasing more detail. A tool-free, quick-release nozzle also means a clog or a filament swap doesn’t turn into a repair job.
AI Modeling and a Growing Model Library
If you can dream it, ugee can design it. ugee’s AI modeling tool, ShapeGen, is built to remove a real barrier to 3D printing: designing the model in the first place. It converts a spoken description, a typed prompt, a hand-drawn doodle, or even a photo snapped on a phone into a printable 3D model, no CAD experience required. It lives inside the UFun app alongside a rotating library of toys, stationery, animal figures, and mechanical builds, plus short STEM lessons on basic design thinking and engineering, so kids are creating rather than just downloading finished files to print.
Material-wise, the Funbox runs standard 1.75 mm PLA rather than a filament locked to the brand. That should keep running costs closer to a normal desktop printer than to some closed kid-focused systems on the market.
Specifications
Process: FDM
Build volume: 120 x 120 x 120 mm
Max print speed: 500 mm/s
Min layer thickness: 0.05 mm
Max nozzle temperature: 260°C
Bed: Flexible, room-temperature, no heated bed
Connectivity: Wi-Fi, 2MP built-in camera with time-lapse
File formats: OBJ, STL, G-code
Extras: Power-loss recovery, filament tangle detection, auto-leveling
Weight / footprint: 4.04 kg, 270 x 274 x 305 mm
Recommended age: 4 to 12 years
