Printable View
The standard complaint about the consumer-targeted printers is that they use a "proprietary filament cartridge". That everyone points out the proprietary nature of the cartridge implies to me that there is another option available if you wanted to take advantage of having a smart cartridge.
So, is there a published standard for 3d printer cartridges that no one is using?
Well why use a cartridge system anyway? Why not just get a printer that can use any standard size spool.... 175mm?
The use of any cartridge is a damn shame and slap in the face of what open source 3D printing used to be. I get it's basically there to squeeze every dime out of consumers, but it's still wrong in my eyes.
You use a smart cartridge because you want to make things easier for the end user. If your designing a printer that you're not planning on supporting, there's no reason to do that - your users problems will never become your problems. If you're designing a printer and actually expect to pay people to help your end users - well, then their problems become your problems, so you want to prevent their problems. A smart cartridge can help with that, by preventing people from doing things like printing when there's no filament loaded, or the print is set for one type of filament and you have another loaded, or there isn't enough filament to finish the print, and probably others I haven't thought of.
I agree - a proprietary cartridge is an evil thing and an affront to the concept of open source. But the problem is proprietary, not cartridge. If a smart cartridge could be opened and loaded with a standard 1kg roll of filament, and had a usb port that showed up as a flash drive and the contents were documented so you could write the correct information to it, would you have a problem with that?
Which leads back to the question - is there a published, open standard for cartridges that nobody is bothering with?