Bambu Lab is undeniably the darling of as we speak’s proprietary shopper 3D printer market and the AMS (Computerized Materials System) is likely one of the main promoting factors. It lets customers print a number of filament supplies and colours on a single mannequin — 4 per AMS unit, chainable as much as 16. That may be very cool and everybody loves it, however Bambu Lab merchandise are proprietary. The place can open supply fanatics flip for one thing related? Within the close to future, they’ll be capable of make the most of the 8-Observe modular automated filament changer.
8-Observe is an open supply design that may be tailored to virtually any 3D printer, however you will note it most carefully related to Voron. This can be controversial, however I contemplate Voron to be the present king of the open supply 3D printing group. It stole that title from Prusa, which has been releasing underwhelming designs for a number of years now.
Prusa’s personal filament changer, the MMU (Multi-Materials Unit), has been fraught with issues, so the 8-Observe might enchantment to these customers. Voron customers have had the ERCF (Enraged Rabbit Carrot Feeder) to fulfill their multi-color and multi-filament wants, however its design is much like the Prusa MMU and tends to be simply as finicky. The 8-Observe makes an attempt to resolve a few of these issues with a modular system that customers can develop as wanted.
That modularity is sweet, as a result of some customers might solely wish to swap between two supplies (major and help, for instance), whereas others might want as many supplies as potential. With 8-Observe, a person can merely add as many cassettes as they require. Regardless of the identify, will probably be potential to make use of greater than eight of them.
In his video introducing the 8-Observe, Armored_Turtle supplied some fascinating particulars. For example, the extruders have servo-driven mechanisms to chunk down on the filament and enhance grip when feeding — however can let go to scale back friction totally as soon as the filament reaches the recent finish. Every module can be scaled up or down to suit the specified printer. There’ll even be an optionally available energetic drying heating aspect for every cassette to fight moisture complications.
Although that is open supply, it’s nonetheless a piece in progress and so the design isn’t revealed to a public repository fairly but. However Armored_Turtle guarantees that it’s coming quickly and extra particulars ought to turn into obtainable at the moment.
