Week 18 - Invention, Intellectual property and Income

This week we have the following tasks to complete:

  • develop a plan for dissemination of your final project
  • prepare drafts of your summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080)
    • video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~25 MB)
    • put them in your root directory

Target Audience

This filament (drying) scale box is primarily intended for users of the Prusa XL printer but can also be adapted for use with any FFF 3D printer. The main target group includes users who work with multiple materials simultaneously. This is especially relevant for owners of the Prusa XL, MMU (Multi-Material Upgrade) systems, or similar multi-material printing solutions, provided these systems do not already include an enclosure or integrated material tracking.

Funding

The goal was to design a solution that is low-cost and easy to manufacture in a small FabLab or even at home. Therefore, I did not seek any external funding, as the project is intended to remain open and accessible to anyone who needs it. As a result, there is no business plan. I have no intention of turning this into a commercial product. The target audience is too small to build a sustainable business around this single product, even with potential variants, such as different sizes for various spool capacities.

License

To decide which license suits my thoughts I used the guidance of creativecommons.org. And came up with the 🅭🅯🄎 Creative Common Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Future Improvements

I may not complete the drying functionality, so one potential improvement would be the full integration of a drying system. A more effective seal could enhance the performance of the box in combination with a dehumidifier membrane. Integration with the Prusa XL would also be beneficial—for example, if a print requires 200 g of a specific material, the system could issue an error message if only 150 g remain on the spool.

Presentation

A video clip and presentation slides are available on the final project page.


To create this page, I used ChatGPT to check my syntax and grammar.

Copyright 2025 < Benedikt Feit > - Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial

Source code hosted at gitlab.fabcloud.org