MOD-t filament questions

[Yorke]

Firstly I'm assuming the choice of only going with PLA was for simplification and to keep costs down, but are there any plans to accommodate other materials? and therefore what are the specs on the hot-end/extruder?
Secondly, where is the spool located? I see the feed tube goes into the base, however from the images and the exploded view in the video it doesn't appear that it would fit within the unit?
I would expect with the design brief of creating a consumer product for everyone, and what is looking like a nice, clean, polished design, that the filament spool would be neatly concealed and not have to be kept next to the printer on some secondary spool holder?

[NewMatter]

While we are concentrating on supporting PLA as the primary printing material (most people prefer printing with PLA) it should be possible to print with other materials as well. The main issue is that without a heated bed, you have to do a little surface prep on the build platform to get things like ABS or Nylon to stick. We have done some test prints with both ABS and Nylon, and there were no particular issues with the extruder. It's not an all-metal extruder, however, so the temperature will be limited.

As for spool location, the plan is to have it fit behind the printer. While it would look really clean to have the spool integrated into printer itself, this also makes it a bit of a pain to change filament. We envision that users will want to play a lot with different colors, and having to fish around underneath the printer to change the spool is inconvenient.

[Yorke]

Thanks NewMatter, great to hear you have done some tests with other materials, I have already been thinking up ways of getting the print bed to work, just wanted to know if the extruder was up to it really.

I was expecting that to be the case with the spool, and my next question was going to be about the ease of use for feeding filament if it was located under the unit.
So has there been any discussion on the aesthetics/convenience of just having a spool sitting around behind the unit and the possibility of a MOD-t spool holder? My first thoughts would be a simple bracket off the back of the case but this would of course detract from the clean minimal design. So my next vision would be a separate box to hold the spools along the same look of the printer. My main concern is that if this is designed to be the low cost 3D printer for everyone, then for the everyday family to have one of these sitting on the table, desk, or kitchen bench, the management of the filament needs to be contained in a way that is tidy and convenient, and also protects the filament from moisture, dust etc.