I'm really interested in colour mixing.
Josh and myself at E3D Online have been working on hardware, and have something that works better than expected, with fast snappy colour changes and producing homogeneous output:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmn7K1U06Wc
It should be noted that the long periods of green extrusion are intentional to show the ability to mix colour, as opposed to simply extruding one colour or the other. Fast transitions can also be seen in the video.
But I realise that good hardware is only one piece of a very complex puzzle here. Software being the other main hurdle.
The GCODE M160:
http://reprap.org/wiki/G-code#M160:_Number_of_mixed_materials
Provides what I think is a sensible way of managing colour change.
What we also need to think about is how we manage transition between colour, which is always going to exist, so we must have software strategies for dumping unwanted filament in invisible places (Infill?).
How are we going to input colour data to our imaginary colour-managing-slicer? STL is useless here, is AMF any better?
In the mean time I expect we could hack together something that uses multi-nozzle slicing software to output GCODE, and post-process it such that each "nozzle" is infact a different mix ratio in a single nozzle.
I'm interested in opinions and suggestions at this point. If you're a software developer or similar and want to tackle this issue please do chime in, E3D want to support this and make it happen.
Aside from colour, the ability to mix polymers can be used for engineering applications to create materials with programmable mechanical properties, on the fly.
Cheers,
Sanjay
Josh and myself at E3D Online have been working on hardware, and have something that works better than expected, with fast snappy colour changes and producing homogeneous output:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmn7K1U06Wc
It should be noted that the long periods of green extrusion are intentional to show the ability to mix colour, as opposed to simply extruding one colour or the other. Fast transitions can also be seen in the video.
But I realise that good hardware is only one piece of a very complex puzzle here. Software being the other main hurdle.
The GCODE M160:
http://reprap.org/wiki/G-code#M160:_Number_of_mixed_materials
Provides what I think is a sensible way of managing colour change.
What we also need to think about is how we manage transition between colour, which is always going to exist, so we must have software strategies for dumping unwanted filament in invisible places (Infill?).
How are we going to input colour data to our imaginary colour-managing-slicer? STL is useless here, is AMF any better?
In the mean time I expect we could hack together something that uses multi-nozzle slicing software to output GCODE, and post-process it such that each "nozzle" is infact a different mix ratio in a single nozzle.
I'm interested in opinions and suggestions at this point. If you're a software developer or similar and want to tackle this issue please do chime in, E3D want to support this and make it happen.
Aside from colour, the ability to mix polymers can be used for engineering applications to create materials with programmable mechanical properties, on the fly.
Cheers,
Sanjay