UPDATE: May 27, 2014, 12:15 p.m. — It has come to our attention that this Kickstarter campaign raised funds but has so far failed to deliver its product to the majority of backers.

When Andy Muldowney created the Kickstarter campaign for mPrinter, "an analog printer for a digital world," he posted a goal of $10,000. Seventy-two hours later, the campaign raised $20,000 in pledges. Within a few months time, the small thermal printer that prints dynamic snippets of information (called "mPrints") has crowdfunded more than $88,000 from 704 people.

The mPrinter's simple and intuitive design, in addition to its practical use, contributed to its massive funding success. Smart enough to be used with either Javascript or a standard WYSIWYG text editor, the mPrinter can print the weather, news alerts, shopping lists, puzzles and more through your Wi-Fi connection.

We spoke with Muldowney about the printer's design and function, how the idea originally came from his kitchen, how 3D printing helped with the prototypes and how the mPrinter has the potential to bridge our digital and non-digital lives.

First, can you talk more about the mPrinter and how you came up with the overall idea?

The printer combines two basic technologies: a small format thermal printer, similar to what you'd find at a cash register, and a built-in Wi-Fi web server. You can print straight to the printer from any Wi-Fi device, including cell phones, print a web page by adding a single line of code to the HTML source, or program dynamic content we call mPrints using JavaScript.

mPrints run in a hosted environment on our servers, and can interact with any outside web service that has APIs. When a user or outside events trigger an event, our web servers push the content to be printed over Wi-Fi to your printer. Optionally, users can share their created mPrints with anyone else that has an mPrinter. I hope this will foster an ecosystem of ideas that continues to grow the usability of the device. Some samples so far include: a shopping list, weather, streaming stock data, news alerts, medication reminders, task lists, crosswords, coupons and more.

As an one early proof of concept, I took a Wi-Fi scale and digital pedometer and connected to the company's API. When you weigh yourself and step off the scale, the API calls the mPrint I created and passes it a summary of my activity for the day. That mPrint can take that data, look at other recent activity and do something like print out chart of my recent activity, noting [that] I need to increase my daily activity or that I broke a new record for running that week.

Where did you come up with the idea for the mPrinter?

The initial idea for the mPrinter emerged in the kitchen. My family and I love to cook, and historically we would either print a recipe on a full sheet of paper or use the iPad while cooking. The iPad would get dirty, and printing a full sheet of paper seemed like a waste. The first use case I created was a browser plugin that let you print a recipe with a shopping list on the top portion of the two-inch printout, followed by the recipe. It was easy to take to the store, and I didn't care if it got dirty and was thrown away later.

What about the design process? What and who was involved? Were there several prototypes before you reached the final design, or did the first one stick?

I'm a bit of a renaissance man. My career has always been in the software side of things, but I have long been a hardware junkie at heart. I did all of the electrical design, microcontroller programming and client-side development myself. I designed the first 3D models, but after it was apparent [that] the Kickstarter project was going well, I hired an industrial designer solely for the case design.

Early in the design, even before I put the project on Kickstarter, low-cost open source hardware played an important role in prototyping. I used development boards from companies like Sparkfun, Olimex and Adafruit that allowed me to focus on functionality first, and later go back in and refine the hardware. The trend of open source development boards has even spilled over into companies like NXP, allowing me to develop for ARM CPUs without the traditional cost barrier that was present even three to four years ago. In total, there were approximately four to five different physical prototypes and hardware refinements, and countless software revisions. The earliest prototypes still remain very similar to the final hardware design.

With regards to the physical design, 3D printing has played an important role. Advancements in 3D printing technology have allowed for the development of prototype cases at a reasonable cost prior to making injection molds, something that historically was more expensive and out of reach for prototyping projects on my scale.

Was there anything in particular that inspired the mPrinter's design?

I am a major proponent of recognizing all aspects of the user experience. Throughout the design process, I try to envision and test how every aspect of the product will be used. To me, traditional point of sale printers have a very utilitarian look. Because mPrinter will be used for both commercial and consumer uses, it had to look at home on a kitchen counter as well as the checkout line. Making mPrinter visually appealing without hindering usability with unnecessary elements has been the driving factor in the design.

What would you say the mPrinter means for the future of design?

The largest single element of design I hope mPrinter can help move forward is bringing back an analog, tactile experience to our ever-increasing digital life. Recently, I've watched some very interesting TED talks and read other research related to how our online and digital reliance is changing the way our brains store and retrieve information. You don't have to remember simple things like phone numbers any more, because it's all done for us. I hope that in whatever small way it can, the mPrinter will act as a device which will help bridge our digital and traditional lives. We've seen similar trends in recent years; for example, I think part of the success of products like the Kindle rests on the fact that it recreates the experience of a physical paper page, while adding digital refinements that further improve on it.

What are the next steps? When do you expect Kickstarter backers and other interested consumers to have the mPrinter in hand?

Currently, everything is still on track for a delivery around February. We're finalizing some final case hardware design revisions prior to full scale production and assembly. Concurrently, we've been hard at work on the API specifications and the website that will allow users to start developing mPrints and talk directly to the printers. We're hoping to make all of those specifications available shortly after Christmas for backers and anyone else to start developing content.

What motivates you?

When I was a young kid, I loved to take apart anything I could get my hands on. The family VCR, TVs, and nearly anything else with a plug was never safe from me. That was my way of learning how things worked. A few months ago I watched my four-year-old daughter take apart a retractable ballpoint pen. I inquisitively asked what she was doing, and she instantly became shy and thought she was in trouble, saying to me, "I just wanted to see how it worked." The spark and desire to learn and improve upon things is the force that drives useful new inventions. It amazes me that with technology now, we can take an idea and at a very low cost and in a short timeframe create it into a tangible object.

Images courtesy of Andy Muldowney, mPrinter