I like the out of the box thinking but the filament waste argument is kinda tired and misleading. One a bambu printer a filament swap is about .2g on avg. So it's about 5 swaps per gram or up to 1000-5000 swaps a 1kg roll. Prime towers can be reduced or outright eliminated if you make a sacrificial, but functional, purge to infill part. There is a "long retract before cut" option which has been shown to reduce filament purge by up to 70% too with purge amount tweaking. So if you took a bambu p1s or x1c you would need hundreds of thousands to well over a million filament swaps to get to the break even price of an XL 5 head. and you would then have access to 16 colors instead of 4 in your demo or 5 in the XL case. so for the cost of the 4 prusa mini you can have 4 A1 with 4 color ams lite or 2 p1s with ams with the option of expansion. so 256(cubed) volume X 4 with access to 16 colors(4 per machine) or 256(cubed) volume x 2 with access to 8 colors initially or 32 colors maxed out. (16 per machine)
@@AwwwSnapperz all very good points - which if you look at some of my other videos or my making better used of purge waste thread you will see I am pretty familiar with. To me the biggest issue and hopefully the next big step forward in multi colour printing is the massive time savings that reduced numbers of colour swaps and parallel printing could bring, The ratrig vcore4 ams idex will be a small step in this direction - and I have a feeling that the next BL larger format printer may also be AMS But i believe fully independent multi colour printing is where the real time savings start to come, 4x A1minis with AMS lites would potentially give you 16 colour printing and more than 4x faster print times due to the reduced number of colour swaps.
I was thinking of something like this, but i was thinking of having simply the bed move. Imagine having the 4 printers set up in a circle, with some additional hardware you could place all the beds on a single disk and attach a motor to it, each printer would work on one bed, then when a material change is needed the disk would rotate and put bed #1 in the printer #2, with the additional benefit that now printer #1 is free to start a new piece until the original piece it was working on finishes being worked on by the other printers. You could have the benefit of 4 printers working in parallel with 4 possible material changes AND virtually no down time. The software to make this work would certainly be a challenge because all 4 printers have to be syncronised, but the benefits are interesting.
Yes - I am also thinking that a circular bed could help. I've made a short to show one way of doing it where the heads all rotate around a circular bed independently - but I think it would be more practical to have 4xXY printers also collaborating on a circular bed - a bit like the machine that Nathan Builds Robots has built - but with full XY movement, rather than just in/out like he has done. There will as you said be big benefits in terms of colour changes - but I think the real game changer will be the ability to print the same part in parallel across multiple heads.
@@dwuk99 yeah a singular axis with the head on that pivots around a center point is cool but much more complicated to make. The 4 printers on 4 beds that move from one to the next is cool af tho. One problem though is certainly layer time per each printer. If printing in parallel each layer is still gonna be as long as the longest layer currently being printed among the 4 printers, so the actual efficiency of the parallel printing would vary wildly depending on the piece, but I believe there would still be interesting use cases, especially with pieces made of different materials. Think of a part that uses pla for the structure, some tpu for some corners and maybe water soluble supports. A machine like this I believe would smoke any mmu currently on the market, and it does have some additional complexity but if it works it's worth it.
Did you go anywhere with it? What I am currently working on is slicing to support such as setup. Plus in practice what I will probably end up doing is having 4 heads that move X/Y, plus also a rotating bed and I think it will be able to achieve the same range of movement with less tangling of cables and filament etc.
the channel "Proper printing" is working on a similar concept, ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XBJMz457pEo.html , i do like your concept of upcycling cheaper printers
cool idea but you would have 4 motors per print head, x y z and extruder. You would need a I2C or something else to run all those printers because I dont think we have a 16 stepper drive board. All the Y axis's are on the same rail and you would need a way to fit 4 motion systems on it. Rack pinion or a long screw and driving the nut could work. I think 4 belts would take too much room.
Thanks for the comment. I envisage each head having its own donor controller board and psu - with something like a raspberry pi coordinating the 4 printers. Haven't worked out the details of how the Y axis would work - rack and pinion would I guess be easiest - especially if you wanted the printers to be able to be separated.
Good idea but only for some solutions, it adds complexity, the one that might work is for the long, one color bed, but I am not sure if warp can be avoided.
The concept is great but it looks expensive and space consuming for one printer with 4 extruders. It makes more sence if you stuff 4 extruders in one normal printer like Creality CR-X (its dual extruders already) but four extruders.
Agreed - in the first instance I am expecting to try modifying an IDEX printer to add 2 additional independent extruders. Then eventually I would get 4 full independent printers - probably in a 2x2 configuration like shown in one of the options - but probably also with a circular bed that can additionally rotate occasionally to move the print around to allow the different heads to reach it.
Thanks yes I have been shown the adobe video - shame it never got developed - I would still like to progress something along these lines. Before purchasing lots of extra printers I will probably start with an IDEX bed slinger, with a couple of extra fully independent cantilevered heads added (making 4 heads in total) to see how far I can get with it.
@@dwuk99 the problem is the slicer not the printer you need to divide up the print and have overlapping layers so you're not trying to but join two sections
@@TheShorterboy Agreed - how I see it working is that you divide up each layer into sections - probably double the number of print heads (so 8) - so that the heads to not clash with each other while they are printing their allocated section, plus have the sections overlap between layers to help with strength. For initial prototyping I would expect to divide the model into the 8 sections prior to slicing - probably in Fusion 360 or using some sort of python script to split the STLs. Then slice the model as 8 colours, then post process the generated GCODE to split out the 8 colours into separate files for each print head.
@@dwuk99 the simplest form I can think of is as the slicer process's each layer offset the X zero reference by + or - some value then slice that layer then repeat then maybe sync the gcode (no idea how) this will give give the overlap
Would be easier, unfortunately if you replace the independent Y movement with the bed moving you can't do much parallel printing. I may well however have a moving bed too - that maybe only moves once or twice per layer - just to move the prints to a more convenient place for the heads to reach. T
Thanks for the comment. Would probably offset one or more of the print heads so that they can go past the end of the Gantry into the middle. Would require some coordination with other print heads though to avoid head clashes.
honestly if your going to do this what stopping you from havving a mmu on all of the nozzles for alot more colors and decreased change time as it can be prepared before hand
Agreed - a lot of my own models are 8 colour - with some layers only one or two colours - so I would definitely be hoping to have some sort of colour changing solution on a few of the print heads - either MMU, AMS, Chameleon, Palette, ERCF. Or ideally something even better than these that allows you to have single or multiple rolls of each colour - and manages filament - sometimes splitting out single colours to go to multiple print heads at the same time (via some sort of internal cutting, unwinding and buffering). I have managed for example to get a 4 colour Palette2 to work on one head of an IDEX.
Yes - certainly see that as part of the plan - with the most frequently used colours in a model having a dedicated head, but with less frequent colours swapping in and out. Even for example for a 4 colour print on 4 heads - if some parts of print use only one or two colours it may be quite efficient to swap multiple heads to be the same colour for parallel printing parts of the model, with dedicated colours switched in for the more multi coloured parts of the model.
thanks for the comment, agreed - I don't see the max number being fixed - it could be anything from 2 upwards, and 8 or more certainly a possibility once the algorithms for print segmentation and head avoidance worked out. Might get quite expensive though unless cheaper base printer (link Kingroon for example) used.
Thanks for the comment. I think I have included more space than you actually need - so I don't think the whole thing will need to be quite as long as I have shown. Re moving bed, for single head at a time multi colour printing for example I agree that a moving bed would be simpler. However the real driver for this sort of design is parallel printing. With fixed heads and a single moving bed every head would be limited to printing more or less the same thing at the same time, which would work for some models, but would severely limit what can be done in parallel. Nathan Builds Robots current rotary design is I think more or less as you suggest - will be interesting to see how he gets on with it and whether he ends up adding another degree of movement to his print heads.
My first thought is a 2 pole slip ring for the power, with the individual gantries wired together probably with a wifi raspberry pi also rotating, but I agree that rotating the bed too will remove the need for the gantries to fully rotate,
Thanks for the comment. To print in the middle one or more of the nozzles will need to be offset such that they can move slightly beyond the end of the gantry and therefore reach the centre.
I have a couple of ideas for you. Firstly though, great concept. I think this is nearly the ideal setup for any sort of large object with a large space in the center; for other types of prints though, the bed space would have to be expressed as a function of the radius, and it would be best used in that way to mass produce identical parts with many filament changes. I also think you may run into a problem with dimensional accuracy and/or stability with the amount of vibration something like this would produce combined with the lack of a second z-axis stabilizer. Ideally you would find a way to combine 2 or more extruders on the rods that support the tool heads, with the rods connecting to z axis stabilizers on both sides of the bed. This could solve the stability issue and the lack of access to the center, however there are drawbacks that I'm sure you've already thought of since you designed it like this, such as the requirement of print symmetry to truly optimize speed. Alternatively, perhaps an advanced input shaper unique to this printer could handle the vibrations. Also, I saw someone mentioning height difference between last and first extruders, and I very hesitantly want to say that perhaps a non-planar slicer printing at a 45 degree angle relative to the bed could handle it. Lastly, and this is likely the most difficult to do, if you could rotate the extruders to compliment said non-planar G-code, I think this could be truly extraordinary, however I am a novice with no higher education whatsoever so I might be WAY in the wrong about ALL of this.
Thanks your comments and ideas. I know it wasn't in the demo video, but I don't think reaching the centre will be an issue as offsetting nozzle beyond the end of the gantry will be possible. I agree that there could be some stability issues and will likely need to add some extra bracing on the z axis - whether above or below. Yes combining extruders on rods might work, but I think that would make it more like and idex printer which can't do much parallel printing other than identical small models - but it may well end up being the best solution. I like the non planar ideas. I suppose vase mode is effectively non planner already - will be interesting to see what advantages you get from multiple vase mode threads. Properprintings parallel printing prototype has some 45 degree printing capabilities so will be interesting to see how that develops.
The vibration would never be compensated or able to work properly trying to compensate for all other movement. Additionally it will take a lot to drive these and difficult to breakdown the gcode to handle each movement. To move 2 or more it would be faster with a single arm. Much faster. Rendering this obsolete. It’s a cool concept, but not practical.
I agree that getting things rigid will be a challenge and also splitting the gcode, but unfortunately as soon as you link any of the arms together or make the arms fixed and move the bed then you lose the ability to parallel print most of the time. I think rotation is the easiest way to avoid head clashes, but it may end up being more practical to also rotate the bed - so that each arm doesn't not need to continuously rotate. Will be interesting to see how nathan builds robots gets on with his fixed arm take on this.
You might simply use two or more printers with normaly fixed bed, like voron 2.4-350mm-style (the new sovol sv08 might be a budget choice here). Put them in a row. Construct a long movable bed tray allowing to move the bed trough multiple printers. This movable bed construction should be mounted above the existing beds and it should be removable. As the bed only moves while changing colour by moving to another printer, you do not need expensive linear rails. Still, every printer would be a seperate printer with it's own controller. The bed moving addon would have it's own controller. Software would be quite easy. There is a gcode command to set a pin state and a command to wait for a pin state. So all you need is a simple gcode postprocessing: You slice for a multi tool printer, as example a 3-tool. This gcode is seperated for each printer. After a layer is completed, a pin is set for a second to tell the bed moving system to go to the next printer. First printer now waits for a signal on another pin to continue to print (you might reduce also printhead temperature for waiting time and move the printhead to a comfortable position to avoid oozing etc). Bed moves to next printer, sends signal if final position is reached, next printer starts. If you place the rails for the bedchanger outside the original bed area, you still can position the moving bed only on one printer and the others use their original beds, so all three printers print independend. Or you only use 2 for dual material and the third prints something else. The biggest problem would be all the offset, belt-tension and skrew calibration, as all printers must print exactly the same. With a toolchanger the xyz-gantry is the same, you only need to compensate the xyz-offset of the tool. With multiple printers you have to exactly calibrate every printer to exactly the same. Much much harder. I thought about a "bed-mover" a few years back, before coreXY got common and before Klipper was popular. I thought two Deltas with moving bed might be a way. However, checking the differences between two identical Deltas, I actually considered it nearly impossible to get the result to be exactly the same on both printers. To say it simple: It does not matter if the print result of one printer is contantly of by 0.05mm in x-width on a 5cm cube. It would be a very precise hobby printer. However, if one printer has +0.05, the other -0.05 due to different belt tension, the difference would matter as the different materials would not be at the matching positions. This is the same for y of course. And for any slight deviation from perfectly perpendicular axis (skrew compensation). Ambient temperature changes screw up all your calibration anyway. So it wouldnt be a one time calibration, but you have to calibrate before any print ;-( Also, any multiple printer setup is hard to enclose. For PLA and PET-G an open frame printer might work. But ABS or Nylon - not recommended. So while I realy like the thought, imho the practical problems are still a problem. With CAN-bus or USB to connect toolheads, a toolchanger seems much more easy. Actually you easy could disconnect the toolhead due to this. A nice toolhead is not cheap. However, if you have multiple printers, you could make a toolchanging bay for only one, but still make the other toolheads compatible (not automatic toolchange but manually). So you still need only one tool per printer, but if you want multimaterial, you simply deactivate 1 or two of the other printers to lend their tools...
Thanks for your very comprehensive reply. I think what you are describing is very similar to this alternative proposal ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-uXqAenyT-fY.htmlsi=OZiaiirHaGc6lwL2 . I agree that for any type of multi head parallel printer getting them to exactly align would be a challenge, and would need to be fully automated via some sort of probing of pre-determined fixed points. Shared head toolchangers is an interesting idea.
Thinking about your suggestion further- I think a voron 2.4 type printer is a good choice as it is fixed bed (and therefore the heads are fully independent) - then it means that you could in theory have both printers printing part of the model at the same time on a joint add on sliding bed. Will attempt to simulate a parallel multi colour print with 3x 2.4 printers - with one also having a stealth changer.
Very cool, but multi head printers introduce complexity that isn't justified by their benefits. Making single head printers faster and using multi-filament injectors would be better.
I agree that multi nozzle would be a simpler route to parallel printing, however nozzle oozing tends to be a problem, plus multi colour printing would probably still be serial. I don't think the hardware for fully independent multi head parallel printing is particularly complex, but agree that the software will take some work to create.
defo interesting, i think the big problem you'll find over corexy toolchangers is the cost scale due to each new print head needs 3 motors (XYE) rather than 1 (E). but for 1-2 toolheads i suspect this could be competitive price wise with the right machine. The mini is £382.80 as a kit in the UK, just a non starter at that price. A V2.4 350mm stealthchanger I'm currently working on looks to be on track to cost me around £1k with 6 toolheads (i got a very good deal on a 350mm kit a while back, but still each extra hotend is costing ~£55). (printed part cost is not included as i printed it all myself) parallel single part printing is IMO the most interesting concept and might be worth the extra cost, the strategy to partition work however is going to be a complex problem, especially if the toolheads have potions that can intersect another printers, print path. you'd need to know when these collisions could occur and avoid generating gcode that causes this, some moves will have to be in essence atomic. there's also the question of how work is partitioned, the naive method would be each head gets some cube of area they work in. but this will result in poor utilisation if the dimensions of the object are not the same as the widest point. a per layer work distribution model could probs solve that, but my gut tells me the complexity of this becomes a problem is non trivial.
Thanks for commenting, i agree that the prusa mini is quite expensive for this type of machine, I have done similar videos for other much cheaper machines llike kingroons, bit for some reason the prusa mini videos are getting a lot more views so may go with at least a 2 headed prusa version as the fhe first prototype. A 6 head stealthchanger sounds very interresting, especially for only £50 per head.
@@dwuk99 yeah, still in the build phase, but i managed to hunt out some pretty good deals for all the parts. hopefully when I'm done and have tuned ill put the results up on the voron discord because the cost I've achieved seems to be unheard of
Mode 3 reminds me of a printer I keep looking for but can't seem to find it anymore. I'ts a robot arm or a cantilevered printer which moves using a mecanum wheel in XY direction. The XY is not restricted to a frame or rail but it's running on the bed surface of which the bed can be anything even the floor. This gives it unlimited XY
When compared to the other concepts I have released videos for this design I think avoids quite a few of the head clashes. But before releasing the next video will work out how the parallel printing would actually work for a few example models.
Its not revolutionary if the whole function of the model is to have the pivot points clipping into each other. I don't think we have that mind of tech yet lol
Agreed. Would probably in the first instance go for a single 2 pole mercury slip ring to provide power to all of the printers, with the printers themselves then working wirelessly,. However if that proves to be unreliable would either add more poles to the slip ring, or change the design so that the printers only cover 90 degrees each with the print bed also fully revolving. This I think should achieve the same effect with less wiring and filament management issues.
Ps/ on thinking about it - if I mounted the controlling raspberry pi on one of the revolving printers then I think that would solve most of the wiring issues. Would just need power to the whole setup via a 2 pole slip ring, wiring between the printers would only need to span about 270 degrees. Then the raspberry pi could be controlled via wifi.
For filament management I guess having some sort of 4 way filament holder mounted above that spins around in sequence with the printers would work to avoid tangles. Will add that, plus the wiring into next more detailed simulation.
Thanks for the feedback, will investigate rendering quality. I think allowing on or more of the nozzles to extend slightly beyond the end of the gantry will allow the centre to be reached. Will include more realistic model printing in longer version of video.
Good spot. What I would expect to do is allow one or more of the nozzles to be offset such that it can go slightly beyond the end of the gantry and therefore reach the middle when required.
Thanks, yes In do intend building one. I am leaning towards developing mode 4 further (the 2x2 option) - with an optional rotational bed added in the middle to simplify head movement, and allow things like parallel vase mode. The area outside outside of the circular bed could still be used for other parallel single colour prints or prime towers etc. Will probably allow one or two of the individual heads to be colour changing too (for the lessor used colours in say a 7 colour print). Using something like a Palette2/MMU3 or 3d Chamelion.
Идея прикольная но во первых нужно точное по для расчёта таких слоёв а во вторых оно нафиг не рабочее вот ты печатаешь первый слой а потом сразу на третий или 5 в том месте будет резки переход что приведёт к раслаеванию детали
I will be expecting new layers to be introduced individually, rather than in groups, but I guess there may be a limit to how many you can stack on top of each other in small shapes. I will be doing some blender renders to show what the layers are likely to look like in complex shapes. Also it looks like @NathanBuildsRobots is close to finishing an actual real machine that can do parallel 4 layer vase mode prints - so we should hopefully see whether you are correct in the next few weeks,
No - not for normal printing - but may make high speed multi threaded printing more practical - as it will potential help with avoiding head clashes. Will do a comparison of this approach against more rectangular approaches with some real examples to try to work out which approach is best.
Agreed. To prototype 4xparallel vase mode I am to try something like slicing the same vase 4 times at different initial layer heights, and 4 x the real later height, and then post processing.
I think it should be able to do normal prints too. Where this design comes into it's own though I think is I think it is more or less the only way to parallel print complex shaped vase mode prints, as normal XY motion parallel print heads would get tangled up with each other.
The amount of mouthbreathers in the comments LMAO... Same kind of ppl that are amazed by everything elon musk says... This is a bogus concept, but I'll let you figure out yourself why
@@Coastal_Cruzer I know in the demo I didn't show printing in the centre, how I envisage this being achieved is by one or more of the extruders being offset - such that the nozzle can protrude slightly beyond the end the 'x' (in out) axis. More detailed video to follow with real print examples.
@@dwuk99 you'd be better off with a more conventional setup with a standard Y and Z axis and then have the rotation controlled by the X axis. Basically take the top half of an ender 3 and graft it onto a turntable.
that was unnecessarily mean. they clearly spent a lot of time on this. the least you could do would be to nicely say its not a great idea. I think out of the box thinking like this is very valuable and failed ideas are simply stepping stones to a revolutionary idea. However personally, I don't think this is a bad idea, with some tweaks.
@@Coastal_Cruzer but then the X would have to be super high resolution / insane tolerances to archieve good quality at the edge of the bed (getting worse with growing diameter of the bed) since the distances moved at the same angular travel is much greater at the edge than in the center... Just soo many things that dont make any sense whatsoever...
