Setting up variants for a custom printer

[JohnKray 0]

I'm trying to set up profiles for a custom printer I am developing and am running into an issue with my variants for the printer. The printer supports 3 materials via a material loader similar to the Prusa Research MMU2.0. So I have 3 materials which are loaded and unloaded into a single tool head. This tool head also has removable tool cartridges similar to the Print Cores on the Ultimaker 3. I have 3 extruders set up and machine variants for all of my different tool cartridges. The issue I'm having is the tool cartridge (variant) needs to be selected manually for each extruder. I'm trying to make it so that when the user selects a tool cartridge (variant) from the drop-down, that tool cartridge is applied to all 3 extruders.

 

As far as I am aware there are no other printers with this type of multi-material setup included in Cura, so I'm not sure if this is even possible to do without modifying the Cura source code. 

 

Thank you in advance for any ideas or thought you might have.

[ahoeben 1,948]

This is indeed not something that is possible with just configuration files. A Python plugin can detect changes to one variant, and then apply the same variant to the other extruders. That Python plugin would connect to each of the extruder stack containersChanged signal, and for each extruder stack check if the variant container equals the emitted container and if not it would change it.

[nallath 1,120]

Since we never built it for anything like that, I don't think it's that feasible to change it. Ahoeben's solution will probably work, but it  will probably not be very stable (since it's a big change to the way of working)

 

[ahoeben 1,948]

From experience of actually doing things like this (for BlackBelt Cura and my plugins), it will be plenty stable, but it will break between versions of Cura (so the plugin will probably have to be updated for each version).

[JohnKray 0]

Okay, thanks for the info! I will look into creating a plugin to handle this.

[Jay_Johnson 0]

Did you create the plugin? I have a similar setup and the same problem at the moment.