Anyone heard more about the Ekocycle 3D printer?

[BeardyMentor]

As a quick exercise on how much the filament for the Ekocycle 3D printer actually costs, I did a bit of detective work. While the machine itself is reasonably priced, the actual amount of filament you get in the $50 cartridges is conspicuously absent from their website. While they do not state it, they do give some hints:

Each EKOCYCLE cartridge contains 25% post-consumer recycled materials, using an average of 3 assorted recycled 20 oz. PET plastic bottles.

I did a little research and I found that you get approximately 19 20 oz bottles per pound of PET. From this we can calculate that each bottle is 0.84 ounces (16oz/19bottles) or 23.81 grams. Then from the blurb on the 3D Systems website we see that each cartridge contains 25% recycled plastic which is about equivalent to 3 bottles. From this we can conclude that each spool is 285.72 grams (23.81 * 3 * 4). Now that we have grams per cartridge we can actually figure out the cost per kilogram, which is..... Drum roll please..... $175 per kilogram. The most expensive non 3D Systems equivalent to this filament is Tauluman t-glase which cost about $70/kg. There are a few suppliers making PETG filament for $50/kg.

[Amar Shah]

Wow, that's pretty expensive. I wonder how difficult it would be to swap control boards with one that allows printing anything. You could easily recoup the cost after a few kg of plastic.

[BeardyMentor]

Not terribly hard, but you need to have a pretty good understanding of how the controls work.

Off the shelf solutions like the RAMPS 1.4, Rambo board, and Smoothie board are readily available. All of these are going to require some modification to the firmware to make them work.

[golden_warrior5]

Originally Posted by Quazar

We just received ours today as well, but we are having trouble activating it. The Cubify website is telling us the serial number is invalid (we've rechecked it about a dozen times).

Anybody else having this problem?
- Dean

[EDIT] I just got it activated - I kept submitting the same S/N, and it eventually worked. If you hit this problem, just keep trying I guess. [/EDIT]

I am having this same problem. I have tried a few dozen times now but it won't go through. This whole business of having to activate a piece of hardware seems like a waste of time and resources to me. Too bad they weren't giving out something tried and true like a Makerbot.

Also, our printer did not ship with the "included" flash drive.

[Calvin Hartley]

Originally Posted by golden_warrior5

I am having this same problem. I have tried a few dozen times now but it won't go through. This whole business of having to activate a piece of hardware seems like a waste of time and resources to me. Too bad they weren't giving out something tried and true like a Makerbot.

Also, our printer did not ship with the "included" flash drive.

We had that error as well. Emailed Cubify tech support, gave them the serial number and they simply gave us the activation code. Real simple (Though would rather have not had to deal with it).

[ksanger]

Anxiously awaiting word on when ours might ship. Emailed them today. I expect it will be difficult to setup and create a part in time for this years robot.

[rockychat3]

Is it possible to use any PET as long as you load it into their special cartridges? The printer is super cool but I'm terrified to use up the included spools at $50/each!

Example: http://www.amazon.com/MadeSolid-PET-.../dp/B00PH4D5P6

[mman1506]

Originally Posted by rockychat3

Is it possible to use any PET as long as you load it into their special cartridges? The printer is super cool but I'm terrified to use up the included spools at $50/each!

Example: http://www.amazon.com/MadeSolid-PET-.../dp/B00PH4D5P6

Nope, the cartridges contain a chip that stores filament type and length remaining. As filament is extruded the printer updates the length remaining value on the chip. When that value hits zero the printer will refuse to print even if filament is available.

[Qbot2640]

Originally Posted by marshall

Thank you for this! We use Solidworks but we've had a really hard time with the scaling and this printer. We'll give this a shot and see where we land.

Marshall,
We've only printed one item on our (had trouble with the cartridge jamming), but saving it as an stl file from Solidworks, opening it in the cubify software and sending to the printer - the scaling was perfect.

T.

[Qbot2640]

Originally Posted by Amar Shah

Wow, that's pretty expensive. I wonder how difficult it would be to swap control boards with one that allows printing anything. You could easily recoup the cost after a few kg of plastic.

I truly believe that the cost-prohibitive nature of this filament is going to cause exactly this to occur...as soon as the warranty expires, users that got one of these will figure out how to hack it into printing bulk PLA or something affordable. Cubify has to realize that a machine like this just can't compete against printers you can buy for less than $1000 that use filament you can get for $18.00 a kg.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by Qbot2640

Marshall,
We've only printed one item on our (had trouble with the cartridge jamming), but saving it as an stl file from Solidworks, opening it in the cubify software and sending to the printer - the scaling was perfect.

T.

We had issues with scaling that we have since figured out. We're abusing it at the moment to print all kinds of stuff. It seems to pick which filament it wants to print with randomly. The software is a bit confusing.

One thing is for certain, once it is out of filament it is probably going to be liberated from its proprietary nature.

[Navid Shafa]

Originally Posted by zachrobo1

Has anyone not received theirs yet? We placed an order on December 9th and it still hasn't shipped. Time to contact Cubify I guess..

We've paid for shipping, but still no sign of ours yet. Feels like we've been waiting a while. I'm not expecting to use it much during build anyways, but hoping it comes soon.

[galewind]

Ours came late yesterday (after I went home).

I went home sick today, so I didn't have a chance to explore it.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by mman1506

Nope, the cartridges contain a chip that stores filament type and length remaining. As filament is extruded the printer updates the length remaining value on the chip. When that value hits zero the printer will refuse to print even if filament is available.

I wonder if there's a way to tweak that similar to how you can mess with the toner cartridges from Brother printers.

Could be a fun student exercise.

[BeardyMentor]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

I wonder if there's a way to tweak that similar to how you can mess with the toner cartridges from Brother printers.

Could be a fun student exercise.

probably not. I would guess that they use an encrypted tag. I know that they did on the HD3500 cartridges. Breaking the encryption proved to be non-trivial. I would imagine they did something similar here since they have the tech worked out elsewhere previously. Unlike the HD3500 there are open source alternatives for the controller hardware for the Cube. Instead of trying to crack the encryption your are probably better off just switching the controller board out for a Ramps 1.4, Rambo, smoothie board, CRamps etc.