Piccolo is an open-source CNC platform for experimenting with 2D and 3D digital output. Unlike many other CNC machines, Piccolo is small (a palm top device), simple (one hour to assemble), and inexpensive (under 70 bucks). This makes Piccolo an excellent educational toolkit, and opens up possibilities like icing cupcakes, plotting generative graffiti, or writing an one-off business card on the fly.

Piccolo is entirely built from lasercut components and off the shelf, easily obtainable hardware. A Piccolo library for Arduino will be available to output svg files.

Piccolo debuted at ACM SIGCHI conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction, Kingston, Canada, Feb 2012 and won the Design Entrepreneur Challenge. Since then it has been covered by media including Make, Gizmodo, Core77, FastCompany, and DesignBoom.

Piccolo is a group effort lead by Diatom Studio, teamed with Huaishu Peng, with special thanks to CoDe lab, Carnegie Mellon University.