best full color 3d printing hotend ?

Ive been looking at trying to build a full color printer but am not sure what hotend options i have ive seen the diamond hotend but not much else ?

thanks Nikki

Look at the Prometheus V2.

There is no such thing yet

You can get mixing extruders like diamond hotend but they are for experimentors.

The software and firmware is not ready for anything resembling full color.

Quote
Nikki81
Ive been looking at trying to build a full color printer but am not sure what hotend options i have ive seen the diamond hotend but not much else ?

thanks Nikki

I have a Tri colour mixing all metal water cooled hotend with single nozzle that I mounted on a delta printer. If you use Repetier Firmware you have 16 different combinations(T0 to T15) for ever colour that you feed into the hotend. The hard part is to create a colour file for the printing and the purging of the old colour when you switch colours. I had the colour mixing working the day Repetier published his firmware for it in November 2014. See more here [deltaprinter.co.za]

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You only learn when you change your mind.
[www.deltaprinter.co.za]

Hi,

There's no full colour FDM printer.
E3D's Kraken uses 4 colours, but no gradient between colours.
FDM technology is not realy good for colour mixing,
because the control is limited and the waste is important.
But software is the most important part,
with a lot of time consuming from design to print preparation.

If you realy need a full colour printer, have a look to paper layering printers.
Like the Mcor Iris.

++JM

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/25/2015 07:14AM by J-Max.

I think the barrier is not so much the FDM technology as the use of G-code.

There's no particular reason why you couldn't mix colours on the fly if you could control pulse rates to the extruder steppers independently. Unfortunately, Gcode isn't capable of doing that, and every? 3D printer requires Gcode.

Full-colour printing is going to require redesign of the software more-or-less from the ground up. A great project for some (under)graduates.

With respect to full color and G-Code:

Yes, I completely agree. Moving (quickly) to high end devices such as the pcDuino3 ($60 on SparkFun and other vendors) which will allow Wifi, on-board slicing, and direct motor control in a machine specific way, are how we can continue to move on.

3D Printing is currently hampered by:

* We are limiting ourselves to very underpowered embedded systems
** Historical accident, really. The rise of Arduino, and the lack of a standardized ARM in the v5 hobbyist market led to this.
** We are not _stuck_ though. The Due42 boards have demonstrated that we can move on to faster and more capable systems.

* STL files have poor color support, and express the hull of the object, not the volume of it
** We need a better file format (VRML? Voxel based? Something new?) to express color and material gradients throughout the volume

* GCode is a 1980s technology, and has served us well, but:
** Expresses actions, not intent: "move tool here, extrude so much plastic at such and such a rate"
** Excellent for embedded microcontrollers (like the AVR Arduinos), but terrible for complex, fast, control (inkjet heads, laser scanners, etc)
** Often MUCH larger than the original model file.

Once devices such as the pcDuino3 (and hopefully a RAMPS 1.4 compatible thing like it) becomes more popular, I think the RepRap community will have an opportunity to migrate to on-board slicing, precision color and material control - and the days GCode will become a distant memory.

develop ink plus cartridges with 3d fusing capabilities would be the only thing necessary to detach from the classic FDM and the theoretical QUAD hot ends mixing filaments

i think that the principal purpose for the actual arduino boards is to get proper work in the XYZ axis positioning for the hotend, ok, lets chage the hotend for something more fun and powerful.