Linear motors have been around for decades in high end CNCs, high speed pick and place machines, massive industrial conveyors, silicon fabs, even MRIs. They’re

Linear motors have been around for decades in high end CNCs, high speed pick and place machines, massive industrial conveyors, silicon fabs, even MRIs. They’re a well understood concept (it’s an “unrolled” rotary motor), they’re just difficult to design and expensive. The only extraordinary claim here is that they’ve managed to fit two axes in a $2,000 consumer device. From the video, it looks like they inverted the design so that the stator is a bunch of alternating magnets and they have a small coil on the rotor. I figure FPGAs and other electronics have finally gotten cheap enough to make them this small and cheap so if they manage to ship they might be the first. Personally I’ve been hoping the 3d printing community tackles linear motors and drives the cost down for years.