From what I can glean from the videos and the creators posts:
No matter the choice between UMMU or the full Sidecar setup the quickpurge unit is the bit inside the U1 body that replaces the silcone bumpers the stock setup has the 4 toolheads rest upon with plastic holes and a motorized plastic filiment cutter for the ooze falling through the aforementioned plastic hole.
in the video the creator posted to his YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EH3QAjspt0&t=16s jump ahead to about the 40 second timestamp and watch until about the 1 minute time stamp.
I have a U1 myself and like everyone else here I too cannot wait for some version of this to be available. I was unaware of the UMMU before reading this thread and it is unclear to me which is the better choice for me, most likely whichever is available first.
That said I also own another Snapmaker product called the âArtisanâ that is made for an entirely different niche (itâs bigger, and its toolheads can be swapped out between a 40w blue laser cutter, a 2.5w IR laser engraver, a 200 watt CNC, and a single head dual nozzle extruder for 3d printing). That said even if limited to only 8 filaments due to having 2 extruders instead of 4 like the U1, I would absolutely kill to have a version of this be adapted for use on that machine as well!!!
Best described as a wiper I think; a cutter is usually something in the toolhead which severs the incoming filament feed to enable retraction of a clean-ended filament instead of having to heat the nozzle and then retract blobby filament.
When this originally came up I wondered how it could be done without a cutter built into the toolhead, but having one just exchanges one problem for another â with a cutter, there is a lot of filament left to be purged when the new filament is loaded, but without a cutter the retraction can jam in the feed tube because of it being âblobbyâ on the end.
Fair enough, I can see the logic in your point. I personally neither agree nor disagree as long as the conceptual idea of âflowing singular thing gets separatedâ is conveyed; beyond that I am not invested enough in that detail to care about the exact words used.
Only offering the suggestions to help reduce confusion as it seems I wasnât alone here. But of course this is Ericâs call. He can rightly tell me to go âeff off!!â lol. Iâm just trying to make sense of all of this because to say Iâm excited would be an understatement. Seems Snapmaker too is as well considering it was them featuring his work that even told me about this.
I donât think Ericâs Sidecar mod would work for your Artisan. For your case, you just need to add any open-source MMU to your machine and modify it with some standard Klipper mods and youâre good to go.
The thing that makes Ericâs Sidecar project so exciting/special isnât having one MMU per toolhead, itâs his work in having the time MMUs normally take to swap filaments happen while another one prints simultaneously, something only possible because the non-printing toolheads are still live/controllable while docked.
In other words, the U1 doesnât feel like a four-toolhead machine with four MMUs, it feels like a 16-toolhead machine where each is always prepped and ready to go exactly when needed. Thatâs the genius of his design.
I know it wouldnât work as presented, but the funny bit here is nothing like the side car existed or worked before this creator made this thing to do what it does; my ask/hope is that it could be //Adapted// to make it work either by the creator himself or others (if/when my skills have a hope in hell of attempting something like that I would try, but I am a bit far from that at present).
I will say that I have been unable to determine if the Artisan runs klipper as they donât make a web UI visible (remote control is done via their luban software, and orca can upload a gcode file to it and it will start printing it, but the device tab has nothing on it besides a âready indicatorâ in the top right. That said before I even found this post/thread I did send Snapmaker a feature request to open up access, and to possibly put a klipper translation layer if the system doesnât natively use klipper.
It should be possible to tell from the G-Code or the machine definition in the slicer â slicers need to know whether they are generating Marlin or Kilpper flavour G-Code.
Itâs not that it wouldnât work âas presentedâ, itâs that thereâs no way for it to be adapted. It is a physical impossibility!
Yes, the Artisan has dual extruders, but theyâre both on a single print head so thereâs no way to prime/purge the second nozzle while printing with the first because you would be purging that second nozzleâs filament all over the top of your print!
The entire reason Sidecar works is because the non-printing heads of the U1 are docked in the back, away from the active printhead. That and even while docked, theyâre full toolheads that are always live/connected (unlike Bondtech or Bambu) so while back there they can do filament feeding, heating, purging etc. Thatâs the mechanical magic that makes Sidecar work and why no amount of adaptation will make any dual-nozzle toolhead machine work with it.
Thatâs why again, any compatible MMU would work fine for you. The only thing youâd lose from Sidecarâs implementation is that rapid switching/always ready-ness Ericâs design gives you. But for swapping filaments/colors, youâre golden.
I am not aware of a mmu that works with it, hell before sidecar I thought they were all vendor locked save the random project that required hacking hardware (fine with this) and hacking software/firmware (with a clear guide I am fine to follow but I have not the skills at this time (I am less then 4months into this hobby and gcode/klipper/marlin are all new to me and I have the very begginings of an idea what each is and what they do, not much more)to âgo and doâ w/o such a guide)
As to the specific issue you raise, every time it switches from one nozzle to the other it goes to the prime tower, the actions you speak of can take place whilst traveling to, being at, and traveling from that place. and when pausing, restarting from running out of filament and similar it has a spot off the left side where it squirts out so there is some leeway there.
That said , before I become guilty of putting the cart before the horse, if you know of a âgenericâ mmu that has a decent likelihood of working such a thing would cover 85~90% of my need/desire (that machine is more for raw size, or ability to be a cnc/laser and was never about speed) I would appreciate being pointed in the direction of such a canadate mmuâŚ
Very interesting project - I always thought a Box Turtle type add on for the U1 was the way forward - here I are a few ideas I suggested a while back. https://youtu.be/RJvAmYqDjjg?si=9RY0D25qR5_kco7I
What I particularly like about the sidecar implementation is the background colour changes - this is something Bambulab could have chosen to do with the H2C - but so far havenât gone as far as they could.
What I would like to see in addition to sidecarâs background AMS changes is background priming - perhaps taking inspiration from the off bed prime nuggets process that Prusa look to have developed for Bondtech INDX on the CoreOne.
Something like this on the U1, with the SideCar AMS, and Background priming could get tool change time down to less than 5 seconds (print<>print).
To get lower than this Dual Motion Systems would be required - which makes things much more complicated - but could get tool changes sub second (or effectively minus seconds - if the next tool starts printing before the previous one has finished).
hey Sidecar, this looks very cool and Iâm super impressed so I wanted to say good job man, I know there is probably a lot of pressure on you now as people are looking to get this for their U1.
I know you mention UMMU working with premade mmus - would the Elegoo Canvas be one of those? It appears to be very cheap to buy.
Thanks! The Canvas seems to be a feeder only, with no spool control/respooling capabilities, so it wouldnât really work for this without extra hardware for the spools.
I am ready to start buying as much stuff for this now so once released I am as ready as I can be to implement!.. More than happy to buy whatâs needed today to help test before final too if that would help!
Your solution looks to provide the ability for something I have been wanting forever.. Love U1âs 4 colors and speed out of the box but the ability to do 4+ colors with the benefit of speed being able to swap in unused extruders while still printing without pausing is going to be unmatched! So many of my current 4+ color prints make me a bit sad as you can see a clear layer line where I paused and swapped colors. And of course that still only works for prints that are not doing more than 4 colors per layer anyway.
Would be cool to have some pre-processing script to figure out and tell you the optimal positions to load the spools based on how many and which extruders you may be running this setup on. (Assuming the sidecar implementation can be built out one MMU/Extruder at a time meaning everyone might not have 4 slots for 4 extruders in place?) Basically a way to help make sure your not going to try to print the same or next layer from the same extruder! I am still happy to figure that out myself but just wanting to put it out there as something for people to think about as minds work differently and a solution may just show up once someone think about it.
No matter what I am super exited and watch this thread daily for updates! Thanks for all your doing!
If you check out the videos on the youtube channel, there is actually an optimization feature for both MMU+static tools that will tell you where to put which spools for the best time savings.
And of course that still only works for prints that are not doing more than 4 colors per layer anyway.