Hello, all! My name is hexes and I have a project. I'm not really sure where to put this, so I'm putting it in general (I'm new here).

The newly-announced Da Vinci Color from XYZprinting is an idea I had a few years ago, after watching a video from YouTube's own Angus Deveson, or Maker's Muse. The video was about spray painting filament before printing. The flecks of dried paint mixed into the clear or white plastic during extrusion, resulting in colored plastic. I wondered at the time if a CMYK inkjet head could be modified to drop color onto white plastic, resulting in full color prints (or at least any solid color desired). Now, I want to see a Palette-type device become available to the average maker that would work with 3D software to spit out colored results, and I am writing this here because I want the result to be buildable by anyone with the time, desire, and appropriate amount of money.

I am willing to take on most of the legwork for this project, but I need help. I know next to nothing about color slicing, inkjet modification (as may be necessary for powder-based printers), or the code necessary to bridge the two devices. So, if you know anything that might be helpful to this project, pleas let me know in a reply. I'd love to see this idea come to fruition, as I believe that full-color printing should no longer be restricted to a industrial workspace.

Thanks for any help you might be able to give!

-hexes

I was watching my printer using white filament recently and noticed a sharpie marker laying next to it, because I had nothing better to do, I held the marker on the in-going filament. The part changed color to the marker color.

I thought of splitting the marker open to liberate the internal ink cartridge and slicing it to place around the ingoing filament, then, I lost interest and moved on to something else, but noted it worked to color the filament on that way in. Very low tech, like the best solutions are, now I just need to find a reason to use it.

That idea has been around a long time. You will find pen holders that color your filament on Thingverse.