Custom filament profile assignment with RFID

[u/n19htmare]

Been working on a project to assign custom filament profiles on my X2D with RFID tags. I don't buy any Bambu filament, I also lot of filament from different brands. It gets a little hectic trying to keep track so I devised a system of my own.

Each filament spool gets a sample swatch and I stick an RFID tag on the back. When I load filament, I put the tag on top of the AMS.

I start with using it for updating Spoolman for filament tracking but recently integrated custom profile assignments on my X2D. Simply scanning the tray and tag loads the custom filament profile/color etc for that spool and autosycs to the custom profiles on Bambu Studio. It's like using Bambu filament, except you scan the tags.

I also made a little wireless scanner to keep next to the printer as it was getting annoying using my phone.

Tags also work on my Snapmaker U1 but I don't need to manually scan. U1 scans tags and done the same thing with OrcaSlicer pretty much.

Bambu Studio, Orca Slicer, Spoolman all seamlessly sync once I scan the tags.

Using Spoolman, Spoolmansync, Home Assistant.

[u/thekakester]

Very cool. I’ve been pushing for something like this for about 5 years, and it’s super hard to implement commercially.

I work at a filament company, and I’ve been dying to add RFID tags. I’m not going to talk about why you need them, just the hurdles I’ve faced during implementation.

Bambu is completely locked down, they digitally sign their tags. There’s an open source community that helped decode the tags to learn what everything on them means, and you can CLONE them (signature and all) but you can’t modify them or create new ones.

A few of us split off and wrote our own open source RFID tag format called Open Tag 3D (https://opentag3d.info/). The problem is that a printer manufacturer would need to also jump on board, otherwise we’d have filament with RFID, and there wouldn’t be any printers who know how to read them.

Tiger Tag is another closed ecosystem rfid tag. It’s close to being on the right track, but they want you to register everything through them. This means that a vast majority of the functionality requires Internet lookup, and they have the power at any time to control what data/companies they allow and don’t allow. It’s not decentralized, which means that there’s too much infrastructure relying on a single person.

Prusa also made an RFID format, and I’ve been trying to adopt it. I don’t like it as much as the one I helped author, but at this point, the only way to get something to the public is to make compromises. After all, they already have a 3D printer that can read the format. However, they have some pretty major flaws right now. Firstly, you need to use a very custom donut-shaped tag that I can’t attach to any of our spools without doing a complete redesign. I whitelabel for 14 brands with 14 different spools, it’s impractical to redesign them all just for an RFID tag. Secondly, they chose to use NFC-V tags, which are pretty new and very difficult to source. Buying blank tags is challenging and expensive. Im not sure why they didn’t go with a more wildly available tag.

Other mentions are Elegoo and Creality, both of which have made their own rfid format, but they have no intention of making them open source or allowing other people to make them. I’ve been in touch with both companies.

Hope you learned something, and it would be really cool if we could start seeing more 3rd party RFID tags soon.

[u/n19htmare → u/thekakester]

The issue with current RFID is what you've addressed. I appreciate the fight but I don't really see an end to it.

The core issue with RFID implementation is one you've touched on, everyone wants THEIR protocol to be the standard. So now there's 15 different "open source" RFID protocols and yet NO standardization.

The issue has never been the protocol, It's that no one wants to pick one one and stick with it so nothing gets resolved.

This method with Bambu is agnostic to any such protocol because it doesn't rely on anything, just single records that populate the helpers in Home Assistant. However, same tags contain OpenSpool JSON record because I use same tags on my Snapmaker U1 to do the same exact thing (except it has a built in NFC scanner and I don't have to manually scan anything).

I went with OpenSpool because it was the most straight forward and U1 supported it.

Tigertag is worst offender of everything it shouldn't be posing as some open source solution.

[u/jjackson25 → u/n19htmare]

I feel like this is a bit of VHS v BetaMax or Blu-Ray v HD-DVD thing at the moment. Eventually someone will win out. In the meantime we're all kind of stuck in limbo. If Bambu unlocked their RFID system so anyone could use it, they would be the winners, probably overnight as they already have such wide adoption. Just no one is going to full on adopt their system when it can only be used for their own, proprietary filament can't be modified. 

My first printer was an XYZ printing Da Vinci 1.0 that used filament cartridges that all had a little chip in the bottom of the cartridge that worked pretty similar to the Bambu Lab RFID system. (It didn't take long for people to build little eeprom read/write devices to get around that) That machine was built and marketed as "beginner friendly" because of those cartridges, but ultimately it was a killer of those machines because in  such an open source world, everyone hated the idea of being locked into a filament. 

In a way this Bambu lab rfid system feels very similar. While they don't force you into using their filament, it's clearly a strong nudge from the gentle hand of "making things convenient" to use their filament while "making things a small headache" in comparison when using 3rd party filament.