Disclosure: this article was produced with EIBOS’s cooperation, and the sale links below support this blog. This is an English translation of the original Japanese article.
Hi, I’m YuTR0N.
“Dry your filament before you print” — a bit of common sense that’s finally becoming standard pre-print prep. One company has been chasing exactly that, as a specialist, since the day it was founded in 2020: EIBOS. When I got my first 3D printer I knew none of this — I was too busy printing calibration cubes and Benchys, modding everything, and fighting retraction settings. Looking back, I suspect about half of those problems would have been solved by simply drying the filament.
From Cyclopes to Easdry, Polyphemus, and Tetras — the one that pairs with the AMS — EIBOS has quietly stacked up industry firsts and just celebrated its 6th anniversary this April. The thing is, EIBOS almost never makes a big deal of any of it, which honestly felt like a waste. So this time I interviewed founder Duron (Yubo Shen) over chat — partly as a thank-you for all the help he gives me whenever I’m in Shenzhen.
Digging through my inbox, I even found the email EIBOS sent me when I bought my first Cyclopes. Nostalgic. I had written to ask if they could send the shipping info in Japanese instead of English — and the punchline is that I only emailed them because I assumed their replies were stuck in my spam folder.
A quick EIBOS timeline
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Apr 2020 | EIBOS founded in Shenzhen. The Chinese name 创构 means “creator of structures” |
| Jul 2020 | 30+ test units shipped to creators worldwide |
| Sep–Oct 2020 | Cyclopes Kickstarter: HK$986,297 (≈US$126,000) raised — roughly 10x the goal — from 1,339 backers |
| Late 2020 | Ships the industry’s first PTC-heated filament dryer |
| 2021 | Easdry — first dryer with a built-in desiccant slot |
| 2023 | Polyphemus launches with 360° rotating drying, born from the “rotisserie meeting” |
| Early 2024 | Tetras/Dyas project kicks off (independent multi-chamber control) |
| 2025– | Exhibits at JRRF two years running, deepening ties with Japan’s 3D printing community |
| Apr 2026 | 6th anniversary. Keeps expanding the accessory lineup |
From Australia to Shenzhen: a mechanical engineer meets 3D printing
— Where are you from, and how did you get into the 3D printing industry?
Duron: Hi, I’m Duron. I was born and raised in Beijing, China. My first encounter with 3D printing came when I was in graduate school in Australia.
We had a course where our group had to design a cushioning structure, actually build it, and test it. There were about 24 students from all over the world in that class — and looking back, I was probably the only one who had never touched a 3D printer.
So once the structural design was done, my part was pretty much over. (laughs) Two American students in my group handled printing the model.
But that was the moment I first thought, “3D printing is fascinating.” A design that had existed only inside a computer became a physical object you could hold a few hours later. And you could actually test it — press on it, break it. If something was wrong, you fixed the design, printed it again, and verified it again. For me at the time, the speed of that design → build → verify loop was genuinely shocking.
Funny enough, even though I couldn’t even operate a 3D printer back then, I ended up getting an HD (High Distinction — the top grade at Australian universities) in that course. Looking back, it’s a little amusing: in my very first encounter with 3D printing I couldn’t print a thing myself — and I’ve been in this industry ever since.
After graduate school, I joined a 3D printing materials manufacturer, working on material applications and a variety of projects. I also had chances to work on applications in the medical field.
That’s where it gradually dawned on me that what makes 3D printing truly interesting isn’t the fact that it’s “new technology.” Why doesn’t this material work? Why do results become unstable when the conditions change? Why doesn’t a user get the expected outcome even when they follow the instructions? I found myself drawn more and more to exactly those problems. And I came to believe that a technology’s value lies not in how new it is, but in how well it solves real problems.
That way of thinking has deeply shaped how EIBOS builds products. What we care about isn’t just whether something works in theory. When a user takes the product home, is it genuinely easy to use? Genuinely useful? Is the structure sound? How does it hold up over long-term use? Can its performance be properly verified with experiments and data? We value those things more than the numbers lined up on a spec sheet.
And that’s one of the reasons I still find this industry fascinating. In the end, whether the thing you built is truly useful — that’s something you can’t fake.
— So the company name — EIBOS = “Excellent Ideas Based On Structure” — ties into all of that?
Duron: Exactly. I studied mechanical engineering, and I’ve always believed that breakthroughs in mechanical structures can change the world.
From Archimedes’ lever to da Vinci’s mechanical manuscripts, the Industrial Revolution, and then electrification and automation — every leap in machines and structures has changed and improved how people live.
That’s why the company’s Chinese name is 创构 (chuanggou), “creator of structures.” For us, experiments and data are the foundation of product stability, and producing genuinely excellent ideas from structural design is the product goal we’ve been chasing. “Excellent Ideas Based On Structure” is the English expression of that philosophy.
The letter combination EIBOS itself was actually inspired by a hip-hop track I listened to as a kid. Engineering philosophy plus a little childhood memory — that’s how the name was born.
The logo is related to this philosophy too. And for the record: it is not some “suspicious-looking dude.” If you haven’t figured out what it actually is, try rotating it 90° to the left and take another look. (laughs)
Founding in a pandemic: the birth of EIBOS and “product zero,” Cyclopes
— What turned EIBOS from an idea into an actual company?
Duron: This is actually a fun story. At the end of 2019 I visited Japan for the first time. Shortly after I got back to China, the first wave of the pandemic hit. After the Lunar New Year holiday, we ended up working from home for a long stretch.
I’d wanted to “build something” for a long time — I just hadn’t given it a real shape. That relatively closed, half-solitary pandemic lifestyle ironically gave me the time to reorganize those ideas and make them concrete, bit by bit.
Then I told a few friends about the idea. We debated it, decided to actually build it together, and as restrictions gradually eased we put the plan into motion step by step.
In April 2020, we officially founded the company in Shenzhen. In that very strange period, EIBOS slowly turned from a single wish into a real company.
— Why was the first product a filament dryer, of all things? Back then, drying wasn’t nearly as recognized as it is today. (In fact, I struggled to find one myself back then — that’s how I finally came across Cyclopes.)
Duron: The truth is, EIBOS never set out to build dryers. We were working on a 3D printed shoe project.
3D printed footwear wasn’t getting anywhere near today’s attention at the time, but we saw potential in that direction. The team built a number of samples, and we were in talks with several globally famous shoe brands.
But as we kept testing, we ran into a very practical problem: moisture absorbed by the filament was clearly degrading print quality, directly getting in the way of developing and validating our shoe samples.
Filament drying wasn’t a brand-new concept — the industry had been discussing it since around 2017. And the field happened to connect with topics I’d touched during my studies in Australia. So internally, we’d been discussing the real demand for drying and its technical feasibility from very early on.
At first we weren’t thinking about commercializing it at all. We just wanted to solve our own problem. So the team built our first drying prototype based on our own real usage needs. Looking back now — let’s call it “Cyclopes-0.”
It wasn’t a product born from a business plan; it was closer to the first tool EIBOS built to fix its own problem. But as we used and tested that prototype, we realized filament moisture wasn’t just our problem — a huge number of 3D printing users shared the same pain. And so a tool born for internal testing became EIBOS’s first product, and the true starting point of the whole brand.
From structural innovation to industry firsts: EIBOS products and key technologies
— Looking back at your lineup, which technologies were industry firsts, or at least very early adoptions?
Duron: Looking back, we’ve adopted quite a few approaches that were rare — sometimes firsts — in the industry at the time. Our innovation basically always comes from problems we ran into in actual use.
For example, Cyclopes was very early to bring PTC heating to desktop-class filament dryers. Easdry added a dedicated slot for desiccant. Polyphemus tackled the uneven heating of a fixed spool by rotating it 360°. And Tetras uses four independently controlled chambers so different materials can dry under different conditions at the same time. The shapes differ, but the logic behind them is consistent: find a problem that existing solutions don’t fully solve, then search for a new answer through structural design, experiments, and verification.
— Tell me specifically how those technologies came about.
Duron: Cyclopes was born around mid-2020. Dryers on the market mainly used PI heating film back then, but our tests showed it couldn’t fully meet our requirements for heating efficiency and stability, so we started looking for a new heating method. We found that PTC matched our product requirements better in both performance and reliability, ran round after round of tests built around it, and at the end of 2020 became the first to adopt it in a desktop-class filament dryer.
Polyphemus came in early 2023. We realized that simply raising the temperature could never fundamentally fix the uneven heating across a spool. What really needed to change wasn’t the temperature — it was how the filament and the hot air come into contact. In one internal meeting, someone said:
Then let’s just spin the spool — like a rotisserie.
Said during an internal meeting in Polyphemus development
A simple line at first glance, but it became the starting point of Polyphemus’s 360° rotating drying structure. Mechanical motion lets every part of the spool meet the hot air more evenly, improving drying uniformity across the whole roll.
▶ I’ve reviewed the Polyphemus hands-on here (in Japanese).
The Tetras/Dyas project actually started quite early — we were already discussing it at the beginning of 2024. The date on the project kickoff file is still sitting on my PC. This product had to go deeper into multi-material printing scenarios. The starting point wasn’t simply more capacity; it was solving the problem that different materials need different drying conditions. PLA, PETG, TPU, and nylon each demand different temperatures and drying times. So Tetras uses four independent chambers, each with its own temperature and time settings, and connects with multi-material printing ecosystems like the AMS. Seen that way, Tetras is no longer just a standalone dryer — it’s becoming part of the entire multi-material printing workflow.
— Is there a special meaning behind the product names?
Duron: Not many people notice this detail, but it’s a little playfulness we put into the naming. Greek mythology is fascinating in itself and rich in symbolism. Cyclopes are the one-eyed giants, and Polyphemus is one of them. Eurus is the god of the east wind, Oceanus the god of the ocean. The traits of those mythological figures can be tied to a product’s structure, function, and technical philosophy. The ancient Greeks explained how the world works and how it was created through myth; we want to pay tribute to that old imagination with modern technology. For EIBOS, each name isn’t just a codename — it’s the embodiment of a technology and a product philosophy.
A crazy Kickstarter: 30 test units and 1,339 promises
In 2020, EIBOS ran its first crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter and won the backing of 1,339 people.
— Before launch, you shipped 30-plus test units to users around the world. What put the most pressure on the team?
Duron: Looking back, shipping 30-plus test units all at once before the Kickstarter launch was a pretty crazy thing to do.
Our ask to partners has always been clear and consistent: we want the most honest, objective evaluation — not a recital of the product’s strong points. So after the samples went out, the team was a mix of anticipation and nerves, hearts hanging in the air the whole time.
But the biggest pressure honestly wasn’t what the reviews would say — it was logistics. Those 30-odd units were nearly every sample we could produce with the clock running down to launch day. If even one got stuck in customs or lost in transit, we had zero spare stock to resupply in time. So the message we least wanted to receive wasn’t “this feature is awkward” — it was “the package still hasn’t arrived.” We had sent out almost everything we had and could only wait for it all to land safely. That feeling really was close to betting everything on a single throw.
Fortunately, the creators who joined the test were extremely professional and sincere. They didn’t look away from problems — they gave us a lot of genuinely valuable suggestions.
We don’t preview their videos, and we never ask for edits to their evaluations. Just like every other viewer, we only see their full verdict when the video goes public. Every time a test video dropped, the whole team was glued to their PCs right on the hour, with the tension of following a weekly drama series. (laughs)
As soon as a video ended, we would log every issue and suggestion, debate them internally, and share the improvements back to the testers as fast as we could. Round after round of that honest — at times brutal — testing polished the first prototype into the product we eventually shipped.
— What was the hardest moment in those 30 days?
Duron: There wasn’t a single day in those 30 when we could relax. The most nerve-racking was the first night — an all-nighter. Nobody went home; we sat in the office watching the numbers. And the next day, I shaved my head. I had lost a bet we made the night before. What the bet was about… I’ll keep that to myself. (laughs)
The hardest part was probably logistics. We really didn’t have enough experience there — most of what we had came from those 30-odd sample units we’d shipped earlier. (laughs)
— You ended up raising roughly 10x your goal — over HK$980,000 (about US$126,000). Honestly, how did that feel?
Duron: Honestly, there was no time to be moved. On the day the campaign ended we all had dinner, drank a bit, got excited for a moment. But the day after that passionate toast, everyone was back in production. We all understood: what had ended was the “web page” — the real “project” was only just beginning.
— EIBOS stuck to the rule of not selling through other channels until Kickstarter deliveries were complete. Plenty of makers broke that rule back then. Why didn’t you? (We still see cases today where a product hits Amazon before backers have even received theirs.)
Duron: I’d known Kickstarter for a long time and had backed several projects myself. It’s right there in the name: Kick and Starter. What gets kicked is the market; who gets supported are the starters. For good projects and products to rise from there, backer support is essential.
Every society and organization has its rules. Walking the edge of the rules often earns you more — but we would rather be the ones who keep them. And we wanted to treasure the backers who supported us in the earliest days and protect what they were owed. Without them, today’s EIBOS might look very different. Put another way — what others do is forever their business. We, at least, have our own bottom line.
— Any trouble producing and shipping those first 1,339 units?
Duron: That first run was a tightrope walk. When we structured the project, we hadn’t left ourselves enough time or margin. In reality, component deliveries slipped and our production rhythm fell behind. But we had promised backers shipping within two months of the campaign’s end — and at that pace we were very likely to miss it. After heated internal debate, the final decision was to ship the entire batch by air freight, direct — to make delivery work and keep the promise we had made.
Technology and community: how users shape EIBOS products
— You said earlier that you never ask creators for specific content. Isn’t it scary having your product’s problems pointed out in public?
Duron: Whether it’s a Key Opinion Leader or a Key Opinion Consumer, there’s a “Key” up front — and what follows is, either way, an “Opinion.”
Opinions come in many kinds and from many angles. People say “there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes” — but Hamlet is still one and the same person; there aren’t literally a thousand of him. Products are the same.
Every user has a different environment, different scenarios, habits, and ways of working. So it’s completely natural that the same product produces different impressions, understandings, and opinions. And what makes these people “Key” is precisely their insight, their deep experience, and their understanding of products. Being able to form distinct opinions about each product based on their own real usage — that in itself is their value.
From where we stand, of course we worry about how reviews will land. It’s a kind of “exam,” and I’ve been afraid of exams since I was a kid. But you can’t skip the exam just because you’re scared of it, right?
What we can do is prepare as thoroughly as possible during development and run tough internal testing. Once the product is truly in the hands of creators and users, they grade it — they give us our score. And that score carries enormous reference value for us.
We take everyone’s thoughts and suggestions seriously. Only by hearing the real voices do we see clearly where the product’s problems are and which direction to improve next.
We believe being truthful matters enormously. It’s a responsibility to ourselves, to the partners who work with us, and above all to our users. On that premise, as long as an opinion is genuine — praise, criticism, or suggestion — we take all of it seriously.
— EIBOS products have a culture of users designing their own mods and adapters and sharing them on model sites. How do you see these community-driven improvements and compatibility hacks?
Duron: First of all — thank you to everyone who does this. Our goal is for the product to answer the needs of many different usage scenarios, and in a sense, mods make the whole product more complete.
We’ve been in this technology since the “ice age” of 3D printing. Without the open-source community — without everyone “playing” with this technology together — today’s rapid growth of 3D printing simply wouldn’t exist. And we are members of that community ourselves; we’re real 3D printing users. Seeing people connect with each other on top of our products is genuinely wonderful.
When I spot a great mod, I usually reach out and talk with the author — about our products, their hopes for what comes next, ways to optimize features. It’s a really important part of making the products better and better.
— Any unexpected use cases you’ve spotted in user data?
Duron: Oh, absolutely — the range of uses is wild. One customer once emailed us: “It was pouring that day and my shoes got soaked. I put them in the Cyclopes and they were dry in two hours. EIBOS Cyclopes really works.” (laughs) Another user converted a Tetras component into a chamber-heating module inside their printer.
Human progress runs on creativity, and I’ve always held creation itself in awe. If a product we made sparks even more ideas in people — isn’t that something to be genuinely proud of?
EIBOS’s next five years
— More and more brands are shipping dryers with similar features. How do you see that shift — and how will you differentiate?
Duron: Six years ago, we were one of the earliest brands to enter filament drying.
We were the first in the industry to use PTC as the core heating element — when Cyclopes adopted it, comparable products were still basically on PI heating film. We were the first to build a desiccant storage space into the drying chamber, a design that debuted on Easdry. Polyphemus was then the first to rotate the spool inside the chamber, achieving more even drying through rotation. And with Tetras and Dyas, we became the first in this category to truly answer users’ demand for independent, divided chambers.
That is EIBOS.
Over these years, the features and structures we proposed can now be seen across many similar products on the market. In other words, a lot of our product thinking keeps getting referenced by other brands.
Of course, I do sincerely hope — next time someone references our product features, give me a call first. Or, you know, at least a heads-up. (laughs)
Jokes aside, what matters is always the thinking behind the product. We won’t stop moving forward just because our designs get referenced. We’ll keep thinking about products, keep studying what users truly need, and keep trying new things. That’s the direction we’ll hold onto.
— How do you see the Japanese market? What’s the most memorable feedback you’ve had from Japanese users?
Duron: Japan is a very active and very distinctive market.
If American users focus on “does it solve my problem quickly, can I apply it to a concrete scenario right away,” Japanese users dig deeper into a single technology and keep pursuing perfection in the details. Whenever the Japanese market comes up, what pops into my head is Japan’s JDM culture — not just using an off-the-shelf product, but understanding it, modifying it, and tuning it into the state that fits you best. That culture feels very close to the spirit of 3D printing.
Since 2025 we’ve also exhibited at JRRF two years running (editor’s note: the Japan RepRap Festival — a festival for self-built and open-source 3D printing that, full disclosure, I organize). It let us feel the energy of Japan’s 3D printing community much more directly. The venue is full of individual creators, engineers, and everyday hobbyists, and everyone talks tech in earnest.
Another thing that stays with me: Japanese users are usually cautious, but once trust is built, they support you with real sincerity.
I once got an email from a Japanese user who bought our product after we’d exchanged messages. He said: “If the owner has this much confidence in his own products and understands the industry this well, there’s no reason not to try one. Besides, I genuinely thought it was a good product.” That stuck with me. He wasn’t just buying a product — he was responding to the confidence and sincerity that came through in our exchange. The language barrier does make communication hard sometimes. But introducing your product honestly and answering users’ questions seriously — that attitude crosses languages.
I’m truly grateful to my creator friends and users in Japan. With many creators, the relationship goes beyond a single review or a business deal — they share honest long-term impressions, point out problems, and bring new ideas, and we support them however we can with products, parts, and technical help. For EIBOS, the Japanese market isn’t just a place to sell. It’s a community that helps us re-understand our products, validate our technology, and keep refining the details.
Closing thoughts
Looking back on EIBOS’s six years, it all started with them solving print problems they had actually run into themselves — and from there, new structures, features, and ideas kept taking shape as products, one after another. Most of those changes were born from round after round of testing, trial and error, and feedback from users.
Over these six years, filament drying itself has also slowly shifted — from a problem not everyone took seriously into one of the things many 3D printer users and hardware makers now genuinely think about. For EIBOS, that’s a kind of vindication, and maybe the start of a new challenge at the same time. With printer manufacturers now starting to ship drying-capable material units like the AMS, you could even say the industry is finally catching up to EIBOS. Conversely, be careful with companies that don’t address drying at all right now — they’re either leaving it entirely to the user’s knowledge, or simply neglecting it. If prints fail because filament wasn’t dried, sure, they sell more material and replacement parts. But in the end, that just drives users away.
In reality, plenty of users still treat filament drying as an optional extra. Especially if you only print basic materials like PLA, it can feel like something you don’t really need to bother with.
But as your print volume grows, your opened stock piles up, and you start venturing beyond PLA, you gradually notice that all sorts of unexpected trouble is connected to insufficient drying. Stringing, unstable surface quality, inconsistent print results — even subtle defects that are hard to diagnose on the spot — any of them can be related to the state of your filament. Even PLA isn’t completely immune to ambient humidity and storage conditions.
Of course, how easily a filament absorbs moisture depends on the material, your environment’s humidity, and how you store it. But if what you want is more stable, more repeatable print results, drying shouldn’t be something you pull out only after problems appear, as a way to isolate the cause. “Get the filament into shape first” is a habit worth building, bit by bit. Before calibration, before the latest “ultimate settings tips” — get your material into its best condition, then move on to tuning the machine.
Seen that way, filament drying isn’t just an optional add-on. It’s closer to one of the fundamental steps for keeping your prints stable over the long run.
And now that more people are looking at the same problem, what really matters isn’t “whether the feature exists” — it’s whether you can deliver it in a more stable, more rational form, one that’s closer to how people actually use it.
From Cyclopes to Polyphemus, and on to Tetras — EIBOS has always tried to give its own answer to that question. Honestly, would I buy a Cyclopes today? I wouldn’t — because so many of its points have been improved in Polyphemus. But if you’re already running multiple Cyclopes units, standardizing on Cyclopes and simply adding more might be easier operationally. Case by case.
Talking with Duron, you notice he’s someone who always likes to approach things from a not-so-typical direction. In most cases, the first thing he considers isn’t “how well will this product sell” — it’s a question he asks purely as an engineer:
“Can this genuinely solve a problem people are struggling with?”
That’s exactly why ideas that seemed like a bit of a leap — the ones people initially thought were “a little odd” — ended up becoming new structures and features across generations of EIBOS products.
And the 6th anniversary is, of course, not a finish line.
As the product line and accessory ecosystem keep expanding, the question is what problem this brand — born from solving one concrete problem — will take as its next starting point, and what answer it will bring back. That’s probably the part most worth looking forward to.
Remember the fundamentals of filament drying — and when you find yourself needing a filament dryer, I hope you’ll think of EIBOS.
EIBOS Summer Sale is on
EIBOS is running its summer sale on the official store right now. Prices below are the current USD listing on the official store (checked Aug 11, 2026) and can vary by region and plug type.
EIBOS official links
- X: @EIBOS_official (official account)
- X: @EIBOS_Duron (Duron’s personal account)
- Instagram: @eibos_official
- Facebook page
- Facebook user group
About the author
YuTR0N (Yuto Horiuchi) — 3D printing reviewer and consultant based in Japan, and founder of the Japan RepRap Festival (JRRF). Deep in the 3D printing community since 2020, he works with manufacturers across Japan and China. Japanese articles: psych0h3ad.tech / X: @YuTR0N.
Reposting & Translation
Reposting or translating this article is welcome, as long as you include a clear link back to this page or the Japanese original. Please drop me a DM on X (@YuTR0N) after publishing — I’d love to see where it travels.
Discover more from Psych0h3ad
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
