Digital fabrication tools often assume form factors optimized for placement on a desk. We introduce the Cantilevered DeltaXY 2D positioning mechanism to enable rackable digital fabrication form factors that are optimized for living on a shelf. DeltaXY allows the toolhead to reach up to and beyond the lateral extents of the machine base, thereby supporting very high lateral spatial efficiencies (LSEs) that make best use of shelf real-estate.
On this website you will find our DeltaXY design tool, a bill of materials and CAD data for our reference Fab Unit implementation, links to Klipper firware and calibration repositiories, and useful prior work. For additional details, please refer to our ACM CHI 2026 paper:
We define LSE as a machine's working width divided by its chassis width. This has implications for efficient space utilization on shelving (e.g. in print farms etc.), and may enable machine placement near the "center of the action," influencing opportunities and interactions for digital fabrication. The following image (~Fig. 4 in our paper) highlights this key figure of merit enabled by DeltaXY.
