s5 & material station print multiple colours and support material

[stf3d 0]

Hello,

 

We have recently installed a material station and would like, if possible, to print in multiple colours ie. red and yellow PLA from a single extruder to allow support material to be supplied from the other. 

 

Can the material station swap the feed to a nozzle during printing to achieve this, what is effectively printing with 3 materials?

 

Any help much appreciated.

[robinmdh 99]

The use of the material station in the manner you describe is not the intended use case, it was not designed to switch materials that often. The switching would be super slow(due to the depriming which allows the material to still fit trough all the Bowden tubes and couplings after printing) and because you may have 10.000's of switches which will make the likelihood of failures during your print fairly high.

 

In conclusion, doing this every couple of layers would be unfeasible.

There is also no way to do so in cura.

 

I admit I could hack some gcode together that does this anyway but this is intentionally undocumented and not selectable from Cura.

[stf3d 0]

Thanks for your help, much appreciated

[tabiznet 3]

On 1/10/2020 at 7:19 AM, robinmdh said:

The use of the material station in the manner you describe is not the intended use case, it was not designed to switch materials that often. The switching would be super slow(due to the depriming which allows the material to still fit trough all the Bowden tubes and couplings after printing) and because you may have 10.000's of switches which will make the likelihood of failures during your print fairly high.

 

In conclusion, doing this every couple of layers would be unfeasible.

There is also no way to do so in cura.

 

I admit I could hack some gcode together that does this anyway but this is intentionally undocumented and not selectable from Cura.

If one were willing to take their chances, what would be a good place to start? I have a palette 2 pro that uses a fancy cloud based post processor to add the filament change calls to the gcode after slicing. Would it be a similar process to that, just adding gcode to call the de-prime and change function between color changes? I just need to know my starting point and I can probably figure it out from there.

I admit it was my bad for not researching well enough before hand, but at the price I paid I assumed (again 100% my fault) this was a built in feature to what is otherwise a $3000+ filament holder with a dehumidifier. If I could get this to function for even just 4 color changes I'd be set