Another filament coloring gizmo. I think this one uses dye ? Not sure. What do you think ?
http://spectrom3d.com
How does it work?
Is there a colour mixer/adder at the tip of the extruder?
This was going about earlier this year. It appears to be a way of coloring the filament with ink before extrusion. They wouldn’t say or show anything about how it worked, I’m guessing it is a more refined, controllable version of what people have been doing with markers.
In the video at 00:31 there’s a rather large “black box” feeding the printer. Could be dye. I guess if you know the exact distance between inserting dye and it appearing at the print head it would work. With a ~ 1/4 meter lag you’d need to manage things well.
Yeah it uses markers. Spectrom Live: http://youtu.be/LSydY7jGZCo
Spectrom Example: http://youtu.be/fGfhhQ68BMw
Sharpies? Now that’s something to try… thanks for the links.
They are probably using something other than sharpies. Although sharpies work, you won’t get the rich colors that you see in the video.
To be open and honest, I have actually spent many months designing something that works just like this with special dyes, electronics, etc. I have had many problems with money, delays, and setbacks though, and I don’t think the final product will see its day anymore. Spectrom has done a good job, and although I have some different ideas for doing this, I probably won’t keep pursuing this…unless they charge an insane amount and keep it closed source…then I might get back into the swing of things, and make it all open source!
Just curious @Ryan_Branch , was your pigment water based, or did you use a special solvent?
Did you add the pigment at the output of the extruder, inside the extruder tube, or prior to the extruder, like this Spectrom machine?
It was solvent based. Water based pigments just wipe right off the filament. I also added the pigment to the filament before it reached the extruder. That way the dye/pigment is able to dry on the filament before it is extruded.
We saw it working at CES and was reasonably impressed certainly more so than botObjects, the guys behind it are established chemical engineers and it was working on site.
Here’s a video interview of their partners Robo3D discussing it we filmed. Apologies for the click bait “full colour claim” it is far from full colour: http://mytct.co/Robo3DCES