Latest update to blog 6th Jan – multi colour printing without wipe and prime towers.

Before I launch into this, it occurs to me that people not familiar with mixing hot ends might be confused when I talk about tool changes. I explain how to define tools in another post, so I won’t go into it again here. Just be aware that a tool change and a colour change are one and the same thing, so I apologise if might use the terms interchangeably.  Also of course, “colour” and “color” are the same thing but I’m English so to me it’s “colour”.

As I reported earlier, I found an issue with the original script when tool (colour) changes were close together. Having looked again at my feeble attempt to write code, I did find the problem – in fact I found a few.

The main issue was that the script would not move a tool change to a position earlier than the previous tool change. On the face of it, that seems logical. However, the script didn’t “remember” that the previous tool change itself had been moved to an earlier position in the file. One way to think about it is a stream of commands with tool changes at various points and we need to move all these tool changes forward in the file by an amount equivalent to, (for the sake of argument) 2.5mm of extruded filament. It shouldn’t matter if there is only 1.0mm of filament between some of these tool changes as they will all be shifted by the same amount.

That was the main thing I needed to fix but while I was looking at the code, I found a couple of other problems. The first was that the way I segmented the moves was incorrect. That is to say that the new tool position is almost invariably somewhere in an existing “XYE” move so that move has to be split, the tool change inserted and then the rest of the move completed. So one line is replaced by two lines with a tool chnage command inserted between them. The amount of filament extruded (the “E” number) was correctly apportioned to each line but the corresponding X and Y amounts were not correctly apportioned.

The other thing I found was that the new lines could be inserted in the wrong place in certain circumstances. As an example, my machine is set to do very fast “non-print” moves so it might have a line something like “G1 X170.329 Y165.990 F21000.000” (a feed rate of 21,000 mm/min or 350mm/sec) followed by “G1 F4800” which sets the speed back down, in this case to 4,800 mm/min or 80mm/sec for normal printing. I discovered that in some instances, the script would put the new segmented moves and tool  change command after the fast non-print move but before the speed change back to normal command. This would have resulted in those two print moves being executed at 350mm/sec which would have been interesting to watch!

So I have deleted the link in the original post to the Python script and here is my latest feeble attempt. It does actually get the job done but I know any professional code writer will probably burst into tears if they see it.

To save a lot of copying, pasting and formatting of text, I’ve take a number of screen “snips” of the code. The comments should make it clear as to what I’m trying to do.

I haven’t included a link to the script this time but I’ll make it available if anyone is interested. Just leave a comment if you want me to do this.

Ian