Highlights from Rocky Mountain RepRap Festival 2025

The Rocky Mountain RepRap Festival had an amazing third annual event on May 17-18 2025 in its usual venue, the Pedersen Toyota Center at the Ranch Events complex in Loveland, Colorado. The two-day event celebrating all things 3D printing had an estimated 3,600 attendees the first day and 1,700 the second, plus about 500 people exhibiting in a bit under 300 booths. This was the biggest year so far, with all of that coming to about 6,000 people in two exhibit halls.

Here you can see the enormous pile of lanyards just before the public was allowed in on Saturday.

Multi-color printing was all the rage this year. While there were a few fresh independent dual-extrusion (IDEX) machines on display, these mostly fell into two categories: tool changers and multiplexers. The Prusa XL toolchanger was on display, but there were also several Voron-derived designs. Although Prusa’s MMU has been available for years, filament multiplexing really took off this year thanks to the AMS for Bambu printers and the open source BoxTurtle by ArmoredTurtle for Vorons and other Klipper-based printers.

This obsession with multicolor printing was on display with the MakerChips that everyone was passing around and collecting. Many booths were handing out these poker-chip-like prints, with unique color schemes, a logo on one side, and a QR code on the reverse.

One whole table was dedicated to displaying as many different MakerChips as possible in display cases that looked like Connect Four boards.

One fun exhibit was DiamondBack nozzles, which brought an ice sculpture and small samples of materials used in their nozzles and others. Attendees were invited to hold material samples and see how quickly the DiamondBack nozzle material conducted the cold, an advantage in transferring heat to the print material.

Gloop drew a lot of attention with the huge industrial robot arm (lovingly named J.E.Ph.F.) that they brought to compete in tug-of-war with attendees to demonstrate the strength of their 3D print adhesive. This contrasted humorously with the tiny one from our Make: Trigonometry book that we were running just across the aisle.

Finally, we were excited to have so much interest in our Make: math books and 3D printed models. Hope we can make it next year in Colorado!