3rd-Party Filament on Da Vinci miniMaker Printer

So I picked up a barely used Da Vinci miniMaker 3D printer on eBay. It was very cheap ($24) because it was listed as “not working”. The description said it was missing the power supply. When it arrived I found that it looked to be in great condition. I dug through my bin of extra wall-warts and found a suitable power supply (24v DC 3.2A). I also found a suitable barrel connector and soldered it on. Once I plugged it in and powered it on all was well! It came with a nearly complete spool of filament that I burned through rather quickly. Because the Da Vinci printers use RFID to force you to use only their filament (4-times the price of normal PLA), I looked into my options.

I ended up picking up some nfc213 sticker RFID tags on eBay for less than 50¢ each and used the ReelTool android app (found here) to program/reset tags.

All that was left was to make a spool holder to allow the filament to feed up into the printer smoothly.

With a little guidance, my son designed, laser-cut, and assembled a holder.