alt Hacker NewsI’ve always liked the idea of multi-color. But one of the big mental stumbling blocks for me was needing so many colors. I’m not the kind of person who does a lot of 3-D printing and can justify having a wall of different filaments just to put a different colored label on top of a part.
When I first saw this pop-up in the community it was clear this was a fix. No it’s not as good as owning a roll of some specific color, but for a ton of use cases it’s absolutely good enough or maybe even perfect.
It made me want an INDX all over again, now thinking I should buy more heads. I knew they’d jump on, I’m glad it’s this early so it will be available by the time mine arrives.
I’m sure this is a huge boon for them, Snapmaker’s U1, and the new Bambu with more than 2 heads. HUGE value add just through software. Speed difference between those and MMU/AMS is now more important than ever if you want this.
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Xerox had (maybe still has?) some printers with 5 or 6 color toner capacity. CMYK plus you could order special color toner in stock or fully custom mixes (minimum order sizes apply for full custom) but it was great for companies who had logos which could not be exactly represented by CMYK half toning as the spot color toner could be their exact logo color.
I’m sure the same kind of thing would be possible using Prusa’s documented methods with a little extra work.
I recently started playing around with my Palette 3 again (on a MK3.5S). It’s an amazing piece of engineering that has a reputation for being frustrating to use. It’s now discontinued but Mosaic still sell spare parts and it’s designed to be stripped down and repaired. Despite the problems, it was built by good engineers - it uses one torx head for all screws (and comes with a driver). The next printer I get will probably be an INDX system though, the future is multitool.
I had written it off, because of how irritating Mosaic’s cloud slicer is. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how well it works with a fork of P2PP (vhspace/p2pp), a post processor for PrusaSlicer that is completely local. All it does is swap out the filament change commands with Palette splice instructions. I fixed a few gcode interpreter bugs that solved the issues I had with bed calibration and extrusion, and even splicing seems quite reliable. I’ve been using it for simple 2-color same-brand prints that would require a lot of manual changing, so not complex but it’s much nicer to use than an MMU2.
I’m excited to try this out for sure.