JRRF; One Week Later

22 June 2025

It’s been one week since the Japan RepRap Festival, an event held to celebrate, meet, and share ideas with other 3D printing enthusiasts. The turnout was incredible and far exceeded our expectations. I’m Matthew, a contributor, and I wanted to talk about the experience at the Japan RepRap Festival and how the Manyfold project was represented.

If you’re unfamiliar with the name, RepRap is a project first founded in 2005 to bring low-cost desktop 3D printing to the world. It spawned a whole ecosystem of 3D printers that enthusiasts could build at home. It is safe to say that RepRap was the start of the consumer 3D printing industry as we know it today. Prusa Research got its start by making a commercially available version of a RepRap printer design. The Prusa i3 was an open source design that many companies then borrowed ideas from and evolved over the past decade.

RepRap festivals are a gathering of people celebrating the RepRap project by bringing their own 3D printers and showing off what they have made with them. The participants in the booths, the attendees, and the organizers make up a RepRap festival and not just the things they bring. The people involved really make a difference. When attendees roam around, they talk to each other and share ideas, they’ll even take ideas from one booth to bring to another booth. You see this in Maker Faires as well but RepRap Festivals focus solely on the 3D printing and importantly the 3D printers themselves while Maker Faires are more broad showcases.

While there were many organizers, YuTR0N, also known as Psych0h3ad on Twitter, was the leader of the organizing committee for the Japan RepRap Festival. Behind the scenes he coordinated with major companies, published many many social media posts, and in general led the festival to have such an incredible attendance rate. Without his pressure to get things moving quickly, I don’t think it would have happened. In our chat channels, we were still saying things like “it would be nice to attend one of those” but we didn’t actually push forward with the idea. YuTR0N pushed forward and I’m incredibly thankful for it.

With all of that introduction about the festival out of the way, I want to talk about how a software project participates in a largely hardware-oriented festival. I’ll share a picture below of the “booth” Manyfold had and then describe it in more detail.

Manyfold had a half-booth, shared with Fysetc. If you’re in the DIY 3D printer community, you’ll recognize that name. While they only had a half-booth, the Fysetc booth was run by a few other folks from other countries and that group was also running a few other nearby booths. There’s some mess here as we were still setting up for the event.

Looking at the photo you can see there isn’t much there to capture people’s attention. Many people thought it was just part of Fysetc’s products and glanced over it. I brought some sheets to hand out describing the project and some stickers (thank you James!). But it’s completely forgettable in an event where a group had a kei truck with a 3D printed cabin on the back (!!!!). There were so many cool things to see that a “web-based 3D print file manager” just wasn’t that attractive. There is only a small overlap between the 3D printer group and the types to install a self-hosted server.

To help with draw people in, I intended on bringing a 3D-printed claw machine. Unfortunately, I could not finish the design in time for the event. So, I brought a computer to display the Manyfold UI and some prize capsules. The same capsules you would find in machines all over Japan. Inside the capsules was a 608 (skateboard) bearing and a link to the 3dprint.social public Manyfold instance to a model that can be printed. The bearing pops into the model and it’s something people can take home. The’ll need to 3D print the model themselves but they see Manyfold again outside of the event. I hope this helped but we won’t know for some time.

One thing that’s common at RepRap festivals is exchanging Makerchips. I don’t have an MMU, so I didn’t try to print these. I will build an MMU this year so I hope to bring them to another event in the future. I have an idea to create a gachapon machine that accepts Makerchips, so I hope to be able to finish that design in time for another event. While it’s not a RepRap Festival, there’s another event being held in Osaka in September 2025.

I hope to see you all at future events!