Support for OpenTag in AMS

I’m afraid that opening up the filament ecosystem to open standards is not in Bambu’s interest money-wise.

But it really would be the right thing to do

+1 for https://openprinttag.org/

I agree with your point. I plan to switch to Prusa for my next printer, as I am willing to pay more to support open standards and a community-focused ecosystem.

It may not align with their intended business plan, but the industry is headed that way and Bambu has been a big driver of it, albeit unintentionally.

Because Bambu hasn’t been able to supply filament well for 6+ months now, they’ve unintentionally created a HUGE market for reselling old RFID tags, which users are slapping onto spools of third party filament, and the results can be all over the place.

Bambu needs to recognize that keeping users locked into an inadequately supplied ecosystem is unreasonable. They can either pivot strategy to an open standard, or they can remain in denial and their users will do it for them, which they’re already partially achieving, but it’s only a matter of time before someone cracks their tag encryption and starts making their own custom tags.

Their tag encryption has been hacked. You can read their spools on a Snapmaker U1 now.

Yes, and there is an Android app for reading them, too.

But it isn’t possible to create new tags for filaments that Bambu hasn’t already released tags for. Truly cracking encryption would mean we know how to replicate it.

Yea. I agree that this really only makes the readers on their AMS’s more useless, especially since you can’t get their filament in a reliable way. Well, if they can read the tags, somebody got the read keys. There must be a different write key that will be near impossible to get, I guess.

I posted an RFID system for reusing the tags combining a spool desiccant. I am supprized how few downloads it has gotten.
https://makerworld.com/en/models/2283157-spool-desiccant-hub-with-rfid#profileId-2490048

I wonder if Bambu has been throttling is visibility. I have no evidence of this. But it is posible.

Bambu has some good quality, reasonably priced filaments. Most of my stockpile of filament is Bambu. For a system like mentioned to work you need a collection of tags. Most of the time I have not had a problem getting the filament in the time. But …

I’ve seen plenty of RFID holders on MakerWorld, I’m not sure this is an issue of de-prioritizing so much as it’s the sum of a bunch of small issues.

  1. Both center spool silica holders and RFID holders are a saturated design space, you’re the latest in long line of a lot of designs that do these things already.

  2. Spool center silica holders suck, especially ones that have most of their holes in the center of the spindle. What’s that for, drying out the plastic/cardboard spool?

  3. Your object title is oddly formatted and it isn’t immediately clear what it does from the name alone.

  4. There’s lots of additional tag words you can use to increase visibility.

  5. The picture in the app doesn’t focus on the function of the object, it’s very visually busy.

  6. I don’t know how that little vented plug works, screw in or friction fit, but it’s unnecessarily complex.

  7. I like the card that holds the little RFID holders, that’s a clever idea.

  8. They’re not NFC tags, they’re RFID.

  9. I don’t know why you’d label the tag holder and the card that holds all the tag holders. That bugs me, I’d only label the individual tag holders.

  10. Why are there so many pictures, including some that appear to be duplicates?

I would also appreciate if the AMS could support open tag. Even more so if Bambu lab would allow community profiles for 3rd party filament so your slicer would automatically load the top profile for the filament you are printing with. Hopefully as support for this technology grows in the future all manufacturers will include tags with profiles for their filament.

thanks for the feedback Carbonforge. Will adjust when I get a chance.

+1, and a note to keep this request from splintering: the OpenTag3D vs OpenPrintTag debate a few posts up is a false choice. They’re both read-only NFC data layouts — nothing stops firmware from recognizing both, and OpenTag3D themselves have said the two can coexist. So let’s not let “which standard” stall “any standard.”

The technical ask for Bambu is small and low-risk: add firmware support to read OpenTag3D and OpenPrintTag tags, in addition to your existing signed tags. It doesn’t touch your RSA-signed pipeline at all — your first-party tags keep working exactly as they do, counterfeit protection intact. It just means a spool carrying an open tag gets auto-recognized instead of being invisible to the AMS.

The upside for Bambu: the AMS gets materially more valuable (it works with the whole filament market, not just one vendor), and you channel the existing reverse-engineering energy into a standard you simply consume rather than fight. The downside is close to zero, since reading an open tag costs you nothing you were going to sell me anyway.

Please consider supporting both open standards. Happy to help test.