not sure this has been posted before but could the prim/purge tower be separated by color or filament for people who want to recycle their waste? i’m looking into recycling and think this would be great in order to not end up with poop brown or nasty gray filament when recycling.
I may be misunderstanding, but bear with me, when doing a prime/purge tower the tower grows up with the item(s) being printed and the color changes at whatever layer has a new color and it stops growing upward if/when color changes are no longer needed and can then end up being shorter than the print(s). And the only way you could have separate towers would be if they were situated so that the head could never hit any/all of them as it does the prints and the towers…and I think you’d waste a lot of print bed space trying to accommodate that process. Besides, the print tower has relatively little waste, and while it’s helpful to recycle you might be wasting more plastic in the process of making several more, and wasting print time too. Just my take on the issue…Regards.
the gcode can move the build plate up and down to lift the towers to the print head, the slicer would need to keep track of the top of each tower and what filament that tower is for when a hot end needed primed. might even save filament since the tower doesn’t have to keep up with the level of the part.
I understand it’s “possible” but I’ve never had a printer software do that automatically or as an option (I’ve only had 3 printers/brands prior to the U1 that has more than one color though) and I hate to think about the constant up and down wasting time plus the machine would still have to have object awareness/avoidance spaces around each one when it’s making the parts on the plate. Kinda cool idea, but not sure it’s very mainstream but happy to see in operation if somebody writes the code and posts the video.
Actually the gcode and slicer would do all the avoidance and such our printers just (for the most part) read the code. And I agree the towers don’t use a lot of filament but in a print shop with ten’s to hundreds of printers running all the time it would add up fast. I know most print shops likely don’t use more then one color on a printer but I’m guessing there are some. Will be interesting to see if someone runs with this idea.
It is a very interesting and insightful discussion.
Feel free to submit a Feature Request on our official forum or GitHub channels so the team can track it：https://snapmaker.formcrafts.com/general-inquiry
If someone has a clear approach and can create an initial demo, the community would be very interested in supporting it. Moreover, if you need any assistance or resources from us, please reach out. We’re happy to help~
Thanks for the link, I put in a feature request.