Using leftover spools

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I have the issue of a lot of printers and they run a lot. I end up with a lot of filament swaps and babysitting to make sure I catch a spool before it runs out.

I see three solutions…other than how I am doing it now.

1-Bambu AMS - $850 Bambu Lab P1S 3D Printer | Bambu Lab US ($950 non-black friday)
2-pallet- $500 Palette 3 Pro – Mosaic Manufacturing ($800 non black friday)
3-prusa MMu style changer ?

MMU seems like the swaps may or may not be easy (I have not seen anyone say it will). Pallet you need custom slicer to do it I think. For those of you with a Bambu, can I just put in multiple spools tell it they are the same material and color and let it go?

It is kind of an odd problem but it could increase my output and decrease my babysitting time. win win for not toooooo much money.

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I have a Bambu Lab X1C with AMS. Compared to my old Ender 3 Max (bowden setup) and my old Ender 5 plus (Direct Drive) changing filament has gone from worse to great.

I think that you could run 4 spools of PLA in the AMS and when spool 1 runs out, spool 2 takes over. I have seen a video of this with 2 spools but I haven’t tried it yet myself.

I can imagine that the P1S is a great printer. The X1C is very loud and noicy and there are some mods, mufflers on the exhaust air, but they are not recommended by Bambu Lab due to the heated chamber and internal temperature.

I haven’t used MMU or Palette but I can’t imagine them being better then the AMS. I have however, had, two events with the AMS, first the pfte tube from the hotend got stuck and second a bit of filament got stuck in the AMS.

The first error was easy to correct by pulling the tube, the second required me to unscrew the AMS, turn it upside down and then release the piece of filament that got stuck.

I would call it great but not perfect!

EDIT: I came from CURA and after using Bambu Studio I can’t imagine going back to Cura ever again.

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Already considered buying 5kg+ spool? Less swaps and cost?

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Oddly I have not found good ones. I get repeated clogs, even on a 0.5mm nozzle. They also are typically more expensive and have giant, very thick spools that are not easy to dispose of and recycle.

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I was hoping I would not have to do any special slicing. As you can imagine I have a ton of Gcode ready to go, and redoing it all for one printer would be a bummer. Although I could slice some select files just for that one printer so I would not have do them all.

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Hmmm sounds like it would not save all that much of a headache unless I swapped all printers over.

This needs to be a product, maybe I need to take another look at the chameleon if it can do it retrofitting one printer should be easy.

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Here in Sweden the manufacturer of filament that I usually use have started selling “pellets”.

Perhaps your next printer could use pellets?

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Okay, I need a link to understand how that works.

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How what works?

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Pellets.

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https://all3dp.com/1/cheaper-3d-printing-with-pellets/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWh1bBGTopo

EDIT: I can imagine someone could design their own pellets extruder.

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Definitely been keeping an eye on pellet extruders. Have a small 1kg hopper, and I think things would be super slick at that point. Might be a touch slower with all the weight, but who knows how they will progress.

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There is ercf and one other i cannot think of he is at alot of the rrf’s
Just a 2filament swapper.

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Interesting, thanks.

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That does look fun, there are some kits but I am not ready to swap out to klipper yet.

3d Chameleon seems like it needs an add on board as well for that so klipper might be a better option. https://www.3dchameleon.com/forum/getting-started/use-3d-chameleon-as-filament-changer-when-empty-roll

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I wonder if you could make something separate from the printer. Something that senses the filament runout and does a swap. Could you make an inline swap mechanism that doesn’t need cooperation from the printer?

Honestly, if it was in my garage I would try to just kake the printer pause and send me a notification on my phone when a spool ran out. Maybe two runout sensors. One at the printer that causes a pause at the last second. And one read by an esp32 that sends you a notification 5 mins before the first one fires.

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I have a new run out sensor coming. My plan was to do something like that, or even just one of the days I know I am will be in the garage the whole time do all the swaps in one day. The sales caught me a little off guard and got my wheels spinning.

More often than not, I try to time it and miss the end of the spool. A sensor will help, I have some I did not put on but BTT came out with a better one so I got one to try. Maybe they will end up on all of them. If I change out to klipper I think I can send SMS with that or hook up a v1pi and hit it that way.

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18

Can you organize parts into jobs that group into 1 kg sets?

Now if the entire kit is not exactly a multiple of 1 kg then you will end up with partial spools after one kit, but if say your entire kit is 2.2 kg for example then five kits could be evenly divided among 11 kg.

If you know the exact weight of each part that goes into a kit then that is an interesting math problem.

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19

Maybe a SMUFF filament changer or derivative?

Which apparently links badly…

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20

Interesting… Usually the plate is pretty full and grouped by height. Things like the LR3 braces though…2 per plate and only take a couple hours, those are a bummer.

That is a new one to me. I need to sit down and watch the video. I would not mind having a color changer. I would like to do some Aza style clear tool mounts for the LR3 dust shoes. I could just do a full clear base but having a filament changer means I could swap colors easier.