Thoughts on Colour Change in FW3.0.9
Hey,
I have been pushing the colour change tool with the latest Firmware and I have found some minor issues.
1. When the colour change height is reached the hot end moves to about the 200mm mark on the bed. It would be much better if the hot end moved all the way to the 250+ mark as the nozzle would then be outside of the bed and the extruded filament would the fall away from the bed.
2. The cooling fan is currently running during the filament change and concequently blows the extruded filament across the bed and on to to the print. Removing this filament is not such a big issue but it is never the less a pain. Could the cooling fan be slowed or turned off during the filament change?
3. When the filament has been changed and the screens requests confirmation of this and selecting 'Yes' moves the hot end back to the required start location. As the hot end moves across to the start location it extrudes some more filament which is impossible to remove before the print starts.
Minor niggles I know but could these be reviews and a fix provided in the next firmware release?
Cheers
Re: Thoughts on Colour Change in FW3.0.9
Those issues are really annoying and actually prevent colorprint to be more than a gimmick.
I also add this:
the Colorprint webapp is a bit too dumb; from what I understand, it does simply search&replace the specific Z heights you chose and add a M600 command; that way you can't use ZHop on your slicer (in fact, the Prusa Slic3r provides a profile for colorprint - which disables ZHop), because it would cause the webapp to add color changes at the z-hops also. It is non-sense. Just create the g-code with encoded layer number and heights markings at LAYER changes (not at Z changes!) as comments, and then make the webapp to search for those, not for the actual z height gcode. That is what I do manually, to have both multi color prints AND Zhop (i really can't print some models without Zhop enabled). But then, the issues described by the OP arise...
Re: Thoughts on Colour Change in FW3.0.9
...plus 1.
I'd also add that currently the code retracts the filament and then beeps to indicate colour change. Unfortunately the extruder cannot retract the filament all of the way out of the housing so, if you are not there by the third beep, there is a chance that a blob will cool on the end of the first filament meaning that it will not pull out of the housing without damaging the feed hole. It would be nice to have a 'Retract filament?' question and wait for operator presence before the retraction step.
Re: Thoughts on Colour Change in FW3.0.9
Yep, I'm using the color change feature lately and I confirm that after the question "Filament loaded correctly?" yet another few mm of plastic get extruded. I usually chase the extruder with the tweezers just in time to catch the last piece of filament. Would be nice as well being able to unload the filament as an option, some times the filament doesn't unload automatically!
I may add that the M600 command has been introduced in the repRap code base quite a long time ago ( http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?146,179790 )