Hi everyone,
As the days are getting longer its time for me to think about snapmaker projects, again. 
In the last few days my quick swap kit arrived and after I installed it I used the opportunity to do some printing tests with my dual extruder. Before the dual extruder my favorite choice for gcode generation was ideaMaker and as the dual extruder arrived I had no time and endurance to fully set it up for the dual extruder.
Now with the quick swap kit and the days are getting shorter I started investigating to set up some third party slicers.
My plan is to do the setup of Simplify3D and ideaMaker. I somehow abandoned Simplify3D 2 years ago and switched to ideaMaker because of some silly behavior of it but now with the new version I will give it a try again.
My first investigation is about the workspace size settings, as I saw that the useable workspace is shrinking once with the dual extruder and again with the quick swap kit.
The focus of my investigation is the A350 with both extensions applied and workspace volume for 3D printing.
As most owners will know the normal workspace of the A350 is as follows:
Normal Workspace (in mm)
B-D-H (equals x-y-z): 320 x 350 x 330
According to the advertising material the usage of the dual extruder shrinks the usable size to the following, when using both extruders:
Dual Extruder Workspace (in mm)
B-D-H (equals x-y-z): 310 x 325 x 290
shrinked by: 10 x 25 x 20
In the special case that you are only using one extruder of both it is advertised that you can use a depth of 330 but I don’t understand why this should extend the usable range in y direction.
For the quick swap kit the usabel size is advertised as follows:
Quick Swap Kit Workspace (in mm)
B-D-H (equals x-y-z): 320 x 335 x 315
shrinked by: 0 x 15 x 15
If I calculate the values together this means the usable workspace volume, if you apply both extensions results in:
Dual Extruder + Quick Swap Kit Workspace (in mm)
B-D-H (equals x-y-z): 310 x 310 x 275
shrinked by: 10 x 40 x 55
So you see the biggest loser is the high.
As you might know, if you configure Luban to use the dual extruder and/or quick swap kit, it shows some gray areas on the platform. If you try to place something there you will get an error message. By the way, Luban has a bug that it places the swipe tower for dual extrusion very often partly inside this area near the y (depth) limit, that will lead to missprintings in some cases.
With this information and because third party software of cause does not have simple selectors for the expansions you will need to edit the workspace size and offsets to get an equal result to Lubans grayed areas.
To find this settings the next step for me was to look into the machine by using Lubans Workspace view.
First you might think you would find equal values then the calculated ones, but I found the following:
Real machine workspace (in mm):
B-D-H (equals x-y-z): 320 x 320 x 275.35
differs to calc. values by: 10 x 10 x 0
You see that x direction is not further limited compared to the original. The y direction also has 10mm more as calculated. The z direction is nearly as calculated (maybe differs because of some z-offset).
The x and y directions are not as calculated and an explanation could be that there is some safety margin needed to the end of the spindles or the side of the bed for accurate printing.
So my suggestion for the Simplify3D settings are the following:
I will try at the weekend if this is resulting in the expected gcode and usable area.
I will update this thread from time to time in the future.
Best regards,
Thomas