How many independent printheads are possible on one CoreXY?

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Diggrr
4 is the most I've seen, I gather it's a limit as to how many drivers you can hang off of a board as well as kinematics getting complicated, being on the same plane and all.
Tool changing looks to be more promising, if someone were to build a multiplexer board--a one driver board that switches what tool (extruder motor) it's running via g-code. Then you could fill the back wall of a printer with pre-loaded hotends.

Then of course, from there someone will want two tool changer heads...lol

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Diggrr
The Leapfrog Bolt is an independent IDEX printer. Both heads are on the same X&Y, but capable of dividing the bed between them to print two (identical or mirrored) parts simultaneously from two different materials, as well as the usual two color/material printing we're used to seeing.

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o_lampe
The reason I asked this, was to find an excuse to build a new cable driven printer.

I though of extruding ketchup, mayonaise, mostard a.s.o. simultaneously.
Therefor a tool changing system would be less useful.

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prot0typ1cal
Robot arms would be best suited to 3d printing a single object with multiple heads simutaneously, as a multi-head gantry system would get in its own way far too often to be of any real benefit.
The slicer would be the biggest hurdle, that and getting some robot arms with enough precision to be worth even trying. Though I've seen videos of such a beast with two robots, can't find the link.

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Sounds like you planning a high tech hot dog stall. What about the onions smiling smiley

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dc42

Surely all IDEX printers can do that?

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Diggrr

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dc42

Surely all IDEX printers can do that?

Of course, but firmware and slicer would have to work together, so it's found on proprietary systems only.

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Diggrr
The Leapfrog Bolt is an independent IDEX printer. Both heads are on the same X&Y, but capable of dividing the bed between them to print two (identical or mirrored) parts simultaneously from two different materials, as well as the usual two color/material printing we're used to seeing.
Getting closer.
Fun printer to watch, too!

Oh, and they say the chicken came first...the protein that makes the egg shell is only produced by hens...if you can trust the interwebz.

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ruyvieira
It's not a corexy however, it's a stacked cartesian or whatever it's called like BCN Sigma

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piper3d

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ruyvieira
It's not a corexy however, it's a stacked cartesian or whatever it's called like BCN Sigma

But it should be easy to implement it in coreXY.

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prot0typ1cal
Yea, it's called coreXYU

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dc42
We've supported CoreXYU in RepRapFirmware for quite a long time. But I recently added "generalised Core Kinematics" to RepRapFirmware, which means that it can support any machine architecture for which the motion of each axis is a linear combination of the motion of each motor. So you can have as many independent heads as you like, as long as you can design the belt system, and the total number of axis + extruder motors doesn't exceed the limits of your electronics (which is 12 for the Duet WiFi and Duet Ethernet). One person is already using this to implement an IDEX printer based on MarkForged kinematics - see [hackaday.io] for the belt path.

Another approach is tool changing, for example the E3D tool changer which is in beta.

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dc42
Its looks to me that your diagrams show a regular CoreXY system plus two additional carriages using MarkForged-style kinematics, with all 3 carriages running on the same X gantry. If so, then the generalised Core kinematics in RRF will support that. But I've no idea how well the mechanics would work in practice.