So, two dudes from Israel in the 3D printing group on Facebook figured out how to mix CMYKW to create some really interesting prints. It won’t be open source though.
WOW so great
If this would deliver clean prints, it would be really really cool
The splitting of layers is due to ABS. Seems very promising. The color mixing resolution is on point. The z/x/y resolution is unrelated to the color mixing, that’s the printer it seems like.
@Nathan_Walkner uh…even better, they show prints in progress. Up close.
I’m curious how small their mixing chamber is. Like the E3D has a fairly long mixing chamber, which would make it hard to get this effect.
@Nathan_Walkner The quality of the print is unrelated to the color mixing. That’s related to the printer’s mechanics. I think you’re really missing the point here of their accomplishment…
It looks like a variation on the diamond hot end with what I assume is some fancy software tricks behind it. Those are impressive results though.
Unless you’ve seen someone come close to the same results before… Yes. It’s closed source, but it’s a proof of concept, and an exciting result.
I would guess they won’t have the significant success they’re probably hoping for while leaving it closed source and will still get cloned by Chinese factories anyway, so it will either end up abandoned or open sourced eventually.
I think it’s interesting but I highly doubt the ink or pigment is not responsible for surface quality issues if it is added to the filament before extrusion through a melt zone, because of physics and chemistry and junk like that. Adding chemicals to chemicals and heating is a good way to get a reaction. Seen similar in the past and I have only been at this 5 months so I prefer credit the original inkjet mod guy that did this effectively over a year ago rather than the guys that have an unfair support network based on a religion to hype their closed source ‘idea’ they could not have even conceptualized without generosity and open source.
Maybe what we see is only the ooze shield?
@AlohaMilton I should have probably been more clear in my original post, but they are not adding anything. They’re simply just mixing regular filaments at a very, very precise rate… at least that is what they’re claiming, but it seems to be true based on the hotend setup in the picture. That’s what makes this really impressive, it’s purely filament mixing.
The precision is great, but the issue is always going to be that different colours of even the same blend of a plastic filament have different characteristics, and therefore will behave differently (ie: different temp, and sometimes even different flow characteristics). This will always lead to poor prints. You mught be able to group filaments by similar characteristics and then bunch them in a hot end using this technique (and use multiple hot ends for different colours), but even then it may not be enough.
@Shai_Schechter That is impressive if its filament mixing, speaks to very precise multi extrusion, but it’s going to be a big job making a range of colors that extrude together without layer separation due to the differences in chemistry. It should be open source if any part of their inspiration and development equipment was open source, otherwise it’s just more bad behaviour from selfish people feeling entitled to take and not give back.
I think the layer separation is only because they are printing ABS. It’s a common effect of ABS material. Nonetheless, this experiment looks very promising.
So how about speculation on how it’s done. I’ve thought of the same way to print colour. Because really it’s just rgb really. Drawing software used a scale from 0-255 for colour I would add a 4 nozzle at least with white in. All 3 at 0 gives white and all 3 at 255 is black.
To get the colour purple you mix blue and red all colours need to add up to 255 so dark purple 127.5 blue and 127.5 red. Or 50% of each. Of you want a lighter purple. You would still have equal red and blue but let’s say 100 of each. Or around 40% the remaining 55 (20%) would be white. Or that’s how I would do it.
on the speculation front, I wonder when Pantone is going to jump into this game…
@Michael_Scholtz for adding light you use RGB. For mixing pigments you use CMYK.
@Shai_Schechter actually, inconsistent filament can cause these issues, and if they are not able to mitigate for minute changes to color, temperature,filament width, on the fly (extremely difficult)it won’t ever really work"well". Filament manufacturers can sometimes have these variants with same colors of different batches.
Shai, most know about ABS. Saying something is a common trait of a material when someone is speaking to much more delicate nuances of melting thermoplastics with pigments that effect thermoplastic qualities… stop trying to talk down to everyone because your not actually talking down a lot of the time your talking up.