The chameleon guy was at RMRRF. Seemed pretty easy to me. He had the only bambu labs printer and he was showing hoe you didn’t need custom firmware to make it work. Just a button somewhere the print head could reach, but wouldn’t often go.
The reviews for the prusa XL are coming out now. I watched the 3D printing nerd one. $4,000 and you need a bunch of colors of filament. Multi color prints are neat, but I am waiting for the RGB filaments that mix together to make all the colors.
But… You do you. I think these are awesome stretch goals and fun projects to push the limits.
At the moment though I think they are mostly a solution looking for a problem, unless you are into printing endless varieties of Sonic the Hedgehog. (No offence to those whose boat is floated by that particular character).
We have a skew towards functional printing here. There is definitely room for multi color printing in functional prints (making labels, self documenting prints, removing assembly ambiguity, or just making functional parts look better). But the real winner is in art. If you want to print a tree, it would look better if the branches were brown and the leaves were green. It is something everyone wants (somewhat) when they start printing. If it were free, or you could buy a $50 roll of filament to get it, then everyone would do it. Not just sonic fans.
They’re not just expensive, PVA is extremely hygroscopic. I generally never have too many problems keeping filament dry in Colorado. PVA I do. I have to keep PVA in a sealed container with a giant tub of desicant. With PVA, you’re basically trying to print a solid form of elmers’ glue stick.
There’s also HIPS for ABS/ASA, which is also expensive but not as hygroscopic. Also not water soluable.
A really unconventional thing I’ve had some success with on my flashforge machines with dual extruders is printing PETG with PLA supports. PLA doesn’t like to stick to PETG, so it is surprisingly easy to clear supports. This is an absolutely horrible combo for filament changers, though- the material combination bascially wrecks any print that mixes these materials through the same hotend repeatedly.
Also noting- the way to use dissolvable materials is to use an “interface layer support” where the dissolvable material is printed just at the interfaces of the part to the support, and the base material of the print is used to span between the top/bottom surfaces of the support. So you use VERY little of it (Because it’s so damned expensive.). That’s fine for externally accessible supports, but not supports for internal parts.
I sure wish someone would do a build series for this that’s NOT a live stream. I really do not like live streams for this reason. I just want to see how to build it. I don’t care about all the other BS going on with it lol
Yeah, a tight build and setup series would be nice.
Lee_Merie recently posted ~4hr Part 2 of his live stream. He’s surrounded by Printers, so Lee obviously has bunch of experience and knows what he’s doing.
Meanwhile… Chris (CEO of Chris’s basement) just posted Part 2 of his 3D Chameleon MK3 build series (edited video, not stream). Between Part 1 & 2, ~68mins total, Chris managed to describe and assemble the hardware to the point that filament is moving. He’s covering Chameleon calibration and slicer/firmware/settings in a future video.
All things considered, am leaning towards giving 3D Chameleon a try, for now at least. Unless folks here chime in with alternatives to consider and/or good/bad experiences they’ve had with various MMUs?
EDIT: Found ERCF’s v2 kit updates (and eventually support) are being posted to Voron’s Discord’s #ercf_questions channel.
The MMU officially can’t mix filaments either and is meant only for multicolour prints, though there are people who have used it for TPU and PLA prints, which is what I want to do. Make stiff parts with TPU “hinges”.
The Prusa XL is getting a bit of traction with the cool kids on Xwitter at the moment - there are some truly amazing things being played with - PLA prints with “soft” skins are just the beginning - prosthetic skeletons with flexible tendons and elastic skin are happening, and the surface has not yet been scratched.
We are stuck with “influencers” for the time being, so we’ve had the whole range of “it’s too expensive and it’s got a retraction problem” foist upon us - now there’s the “well what can this thing really do?” kind of user at work and it’s hard not to think there’s another baby step happening.
I’m fascinated by the XL and I’m 50/50 on whether to buy one.
It will be interesting to see if it gains enough traction for people to fully push the boundaries on what can be done with the multiple toolheads. The multi-material possibilities seem pretty fascinating. PET as support for PLA or vs, dissolvable support at just the intersections between parts, the flexible + solid as previously mentioned, even differing stiffnesses of flexible filament, all sorts.
It seems that the printer is getting more dialed in, too. Some firmware revisions and the shift from 0.6mm to 0.4mm nozzles seems to have solved a lot of the early problems that were being seen.
To me, the use cases for filament swapping systems seem mostly cosmetic. The use cases for the toolchanger seems to have a ton of legit engineering possibilities.
It’s interesting to me that it seems to have been conceived as a “print giant things fast” engineering machine, then the influencer mob started “printing small coloured objects” which clearly wasn’t on the development sheet, and that’s turned it into a really useful machine. Perhaps I owe the “print small colourful things” mob an apology!
Very, true, although I’m not even sure they’re that worried about the ‘fast’ aspect to it. It definitely seems more like an engineering tool, to me, than a consumer 3D printer. That does make the lack of enclosure a little more baffling, although they have always said that one will be available eventually.
I originally dismissed the multiple toolhead approach as just a less wasteful way to approach an MMU type of functionality but the more that I think about it, the more I think it could be an absolute gamechanger from an engineering perspective. We used to get some specialized gaskets prototyped using a resin printer that could vary the durometer. We had a hard center ‘plate’ to keep everything in alignment and then some soft outer sealing surfaces. Something like that with TPU seals embedded in an ABS carrier would be amazing. The current fight we have with our 3D printer at work is that cleanly removing the support from a model printed with their ‘high strength’ material is near impossible. A friend of mine works for a packaging company and they do a lot of large 3D prints for prototyping to check for both form and function. Being able to embed seals in surfaces would be something he’d be interested in, no doubt, as would the options for better support materials.
The possibilities are endless. I guess time will tell how much any this actually eventuates, though!
You’re definitely right about the focus on printing small multicolour things with less waste. I guess that’s the natural first though that I had, too. It also fits with the way the narrative on things like the X1C have changed where it went from ‘holy cow, easy to use multicolour prints, this is amazing!’ through to endless videos about how much waste it creates, how to minimize waste, how to collect the waste materials, etc.
How hard is ERCF v2 to build? Apparently it’s 15 cubes of pain, and 4 BTT Ducks…
Ouch! Am trying out 3D Chameleon for now, and probably a ERCF v2 kit in the future. Am lurking on ERCF channels in Voron’s discord, and Lee’s discord. Am looking at Chameleon as my first step towards a poop free multi tool/nozzle setup needed for more efficient time/material prints.
