Prusa Wants to Make All 3D Printing Filament Spools Smart, Launches the OpenPrintTag Standard

3D printing pioneer Prusa Research has announced a plan to adopt a "smart spool" system using near-field communication (NFC) technology, but it's taking a somewhat different approach to many of its competitors: it's releasing the system, dubbed "OpenPrintTag," under an open source license.

"We're upgrading the Prusament spool," the company announced of its plans. "The new spool comes with a familiar yet different design and several cool features you'll love. This includes improved thermal resistance when drying, easier refills, and slimmer dimensions. But the biggest feature is one you can't see at first glance: a fully reusable and open source NFC Tag. With the OpenPrintTag NFC, we are setting the standard for all smart spools — it's designed to work across brands and ecosystems. It is free to use, free to extend, and open for anyone to build upon."

Traditional 2D printers are frequently sold under the so-called "razor blade" marketing model, where the cost of the printer itself is heavily subsidized on the understanding that profits will follow from the sale of consumables. That same model is creeping into 3D printing, with manufacturers increasingly turning to low- and high-tech approaches to lock their printers down to first-party filament spools — everything from custom spool sizing to embedded radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags.

Prusa's new OpenPrintTag is close to the latter, but the company says it's not about restricting third-party consumables but increasing flexibility — and to prove it, the whole thing is being made available under an open source license. Spools featuring OpenPrintTag technology will, the company promises, provide all the advantages of rival "smart spool" systems such as automatic material and color detection plus more, including the ability to scan spools with a smartphone.

The company has released OpenPrintTag under the reciprocal GNU General Public License, with Python implementation already available and hardware specifications to follow soon. The system works entirely offline, Prusa explains, with no cloud dependencies, the tags are reusable and rewritable, can be peeled off old spools and applied to new ones, and blanks are available for anyone to add to existing spools. Plans are also afoot to expand the concept to other 3D printing materials, like resin.

More information, including a link to the project's various GitHub repositories, is available on the OpenPrintTag website; all new Prusament filament spools will feature an OpenPrintTag, Prusa has confirmed, while companies including 3D-Fuel, Filament PM, Filamentum, and Voron Design are said to be "in discussion" to adopt the standard for their own filament spools. Blank tags, meanwhile, are available on the Prusa store at $5.99 for 10.