In a blog post yesterday, E3D confirmed the new RapidChange Revo, a hot end revealed yesterday at TCT 3Sixty, is intended to be among the company’s first products protected under a patent — which is currently pending. The company’s new patent policy, which was announced early last week on September 21, will extend beyond this product alone but this is the first that has been publicly confirmed.

The new hot end enables toolless nozzle changes at room temperature, E3D says, eliminating the need to hot tighten nozzles. The length of the Revo nozzle, which integrates the heat break and extends into the heat sink where it threads, also means clogs can be removed by simply changing out nozzles by hand. Any cleanup can be saved for later, which is surely an exciting prospect for hobbyists and print farms alike.

With the reveal, some beta testers have shared their hands-on experience with the Revo, praising its success at making nozzle swaps a more approachable task.

The company’s blog post revealed a few more details about the device and its surrounding license conditions. For one, E3D says the new cylindrical “HeaterCore” is “an entirely new heater technology” that is both smaller and enables a positive temperature coefficient (PTC) to reduce power as the hot end temperature rises, “drastically reducing the maximum thermal runaway temperature and associated hazards.”

When addressing how its new patent strategy relates to this new product, E3D said the Revo cold side interface is open source – which will specifically allow mounting systems for any printer to be freely designed and distributed. In fact, the company encourages the design of both mounting systems and heatsinks but specifies the requirement to use “Revo Nozzles and HeaterCores with it.”

That statement seems to suggest the Revo nozzles are also intended to be covered under patent, locking a consumable part into E3D’s new self-described “ecosystem” if so.

With all the talk of patents, there’s also a chance dispute could brew – though there’s no indication of one yet. The observation has been made that Protoprint, a small Czech 3D printing OEM, has a very similar device, its Raptor hot end, that also enables cold nozzle changes. Like the RapidChange Revo, the Raptor is comprised of a patented cylindrical heat “core”, in lieu of the now-common cubic heat block, and a heat break integrated into a patent-pending elongated nozzle that extends into the heatsink.

The two products certainly bear a resemblance — and both serve to enable cold nozzle changes — but E3D is holding back on some details before the Revo is released, so it’s hard to draw firm conclusions as to just how similar the devices may be or what E3D’s pending patent covers about the hot side.

What are your thoughts on E3D’s new RapidChange Revo? And if its nozzles will be covered under the new patent policy, what do you think of a 3D printer device locking consumable parts into a proprietary ecosystem? Let us know in the comments below.