1500 3D printers will be donated to teams
 

From FIRST and EKOCYCLE facebook:

This is great!

Re: 1500 3D printers will be donated to teams
 

Awesome, do they pick teams randomly to get one or do you have to apply somewhere?

Re: 1500 3D printers will be donated to teams
 

I heard there was going to be an exciting announcement for the FIRST community today...

I wonder if this is going to be rolled into FIRST Choice like the printers were last year, or if there's going to be some other process for it.

Re: 1500 3D printers will be donated to teams
 

They should also offer a reduced price on 3D printer cartridges for FIRST teams with the printer. I'd rather not 5-10X the price for their proprietary filament.

Re: 1500 3D printers will be donated to teams
 

Have you seen the price of the filament yet? The article I read recently said that was yet to be determined. It does seem pretty limited on material usage though.

Re: 1500 3D printers will be donated to teams
 

Weird, I'm assuming its the same price as the current Cube 3 filament (49.99). I'd doubt they would make it much cheaper, their business model is to subsidize the cost of the printer by raising the price of the filament.

Re: 1500 3D printers will be donated to teams
 

I wonder if it could be modified to accept "normal" filament? 3D printers are pretty simple; you could probably hack the extruder to be a certain temperature.

Re: 1500 3D printers will be donated to teams
 

It's a pretty tricky hack. in the cube 1,2 and 3 (this one too most likely) they put a chip in each cartridge that keeps track of how much filament you've extruded and will disable the cartridge from being used once the filament is used up. There was a way to trick the cube 2 into not keeping track of filament use but it may or may not have been patched in the cube 3 (and this printer)

Re: 1500 3D printers will be donated to teams
 

Wow, that's Hewlett-Packard bad...not cool.

Re: 1500 3D printers will be donated to teams
 

I have been in the Rapid Prototyping/3D printing business for many years. I worked with one of the first commercial SLAs many moons ago.

3D Systems has never made a secret of their business plan, which is to make money primarily on material, not machines. After all you sell material again and again while machines tend to be around for years.

So they sell machines at a break-even price and make it up on the material which only comes in proprietary packages that will only work on their machines. Of course this means paying 3 or so times the going rate per pound for material.

Re: 1500 3D printers will be donated to teams
 

There is quality variation in off-the-shelf filament, but after going through about a dozen kilos of ABS and PLA in the past two years I've only found one roll that I hold as 'suspect'.

Right now I'm using a roll that I got from www.robotdigg.com and it seems to be working just fine. You'll note that robotdigg also has some great deals on steppers and bearings. Their order process isn't a 'one click' process... you actually have to email back and forth a bit before paying over paypal, but I have been happy with the one order that I have placed with them and plan to order more.

A team wanting to save money on filament could always just rip out the original electronics and replace them with a RepRap style control board. I've built a couple RepRap Gen7 boards (for about $30 each, plus another $30 for stepper drivers) and they seem to be working fine in initial testing. After all, FDM 3D printers are basically just four stepper motors and a hot end, plus some limit switches and maybe a heated bed.

Or a team could build their own printer for a couple hundred bucks. Depending on how much printing you are going to do, it might be cheaper to build or buy an open-source machine and use commodity filament.

Jason