{"id":1665,"date":"2014-01-19T18:07:20","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T00:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/haveblue.org\/?p=1665"},"modified":"2014-01-19T18:07:20","modified_gmt":"2014-01-20T00:07:20","slug":"3ds-cube-cartridges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/?p=1665","title":{"rendered":"3DS Cube cartridges"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tA friend sent me a used filament cartridge from his 3DS Cube a while back, as I had heard that they are ‘chipped’ similarly to Stratasys cartridges.<\/p>\n

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Sure enough, there’s a 1-wire chip on one corner of the cartridge.<\/p>\n

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Opening the cartridge requires almost destroying it.\u00a0 The two halves are actually solvent welded together, and inside is a ridiculously small cardboard spool of filament.\u00a0 One user determined that the printer will only allow 320 grams of filament to be used before declaring the cartridge to be empty.\u00a0 At $50 per cartridge, this isn’t quite as bad as Stratasys pricing, but it’s still insanely expensive for what is targeted as being a hobbyist machine.<\/p>\n

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With the Stratasys cartridges at least, the cartridge is sealed with a gasket all the way around the edge where the halves mate, and the interior is packed with desiccant packets.\u00a0 No such environmental protection exists on the Cube cartridge – there’s an open hole in one side (with a threaded brass insert whose purpose escapes me), and there’s an o-ring on the exit to keep the filament in place (if you accidentally pushed the filament back into the cartridge, you would need to break open the cartridge to fish out the end).<\/p>\n

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Unlike the Stratasys cartridges, there is no PCB board at all – the tiny 2-wire EEPROM is just a tiny SFN package measuring only 6mm on a side.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I actually broke it in half when busting open the cartridge, so I can’t actually attempt a read on it.\u00a0 But at least I verified that it is in fact a Maxim DS28E01<\/a> 1Kb (that’s kilobit<\/em>, mind you) 1-wire EEPROM.\u00a0 Oh, and it’s SHA-1 protected, just as I’ve heard that the Stratasys uPrint cartridge EEPROMs are.\u00a0 I’ve read that the printer can be tricked into running generic filament<\/a> by leaving the EEPROM in place and simply telling the machine “that’s okay, continue printing anyway” when it alerts that filament is out.\u00a0 Newer firmware versions are said to eliminate this workaround but it appears that somebody has managed to break the cartridge encryption<\/a>.\u00a0 They created (or at least claim to have) a USB controlled dongle to fake full cartridges so that bulk filament can still be used no matter what the firmware version.\u00a0 At $167 for the very cheapest version, though, I’d be inclined to just tear out the original electronics and run everything with a RAMPS<\/a> board if possible.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend sent me a used filament cartridge from his 3DS Cube a while back, as I had heard that they are ‘chipped’ similarly to Stratasys cartridges. Sure enough, there’s a 1-wire chip on one corner of the cartridge. Opening the cartridge requires almost destroying it.\u00a0 The two halves are actually solvent welded together, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3d-printing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haveblue.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}