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[Sakati84]

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[csanii123]

I saw your idea on hackaday.com and thought it was great. I have a Creality Ender 3 v2 with a stock config and it is printing standard prints very well. Since I don't want to "break" my standard prints I designed a modular "snap-on" pen holder for the fan enclosure so I can add/remove the colorizer without having to do any changes to the print mechanism. I am going to try my 1st dual color print in the next few days as I still have the pen rack to print and adjust. I did have a question for you regarding getting multicolor STL files. I wanted to just take 2 standard shapes (cube+cylinder) and print them merged as a 2 color print. I loaded them into Cura as 2 shapes and assigned the extruders to them but when I merge it shifts the 2 so that they are inside each other and not in the positions I wanted. How do I do the merge so that the end shapes end up where I want them to ?

[Sakati84]

You need to Design them in your CAD Program so that they are correctly positioned. In your case here you can just skip merging them. This is only important when you have special models that are designed for multi color printing and makes it easier to align then correctly.

[csanii123]

Ok thx for the confirmation. I was suspecting that. My E3v2 "snap-on" allows me to use all the parts you designed except the PenHolderArm since that won't fit on an Ender 3 v2. This way all "standard" except the Ender 3 v2 "Snap-on". Will send you a picture of the test print when done...hopefully this works as well as I hope.

[Sakati84]

It's way better with transparent PLA. You can buy the cheap Amazon Basics Pla - link is in the Wiki. If you buy a diffrent one: the cheaper the better!

[csanii123]

Thanks for the tip. An idea I thought of since most things I print are small is to have a crossbeam lower down and mount the penholder to that. I was building a laser cutter with 20x20 extrusions so may borrow an extrusion to give that a try. This way less vertical travel needed.

[csanii123]

I ordered some transparent filament that should arrive Friday so I can test out this weekend. I also found that my pen holder cracked so that might be why the alignment was off. I think I will print another pen holder but scale it up by 5% so it doesn't crack. Attached are my STL files for prototype#1.
Cyrus_E3v2_MulticolorAdapter_Files.zip

Did you see the email from Creality ?

[Sakati84]

I saw the mail. I have just hidden the message so the mail address is not public anymore. We are in contact but nothing has really come out of it yet.

[csanii123]

Ok. Just wanted to make sure you saw it. Hopefully something good comes of it :)

[ssilverm]

Just saw Teaching Tech uploaded a video :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnWxbU7Hfro

[DatMinh94]

Hello @Sakati84. I'm a doctor and I need to print colorized anatomical model for surgical planning at my hospital. We don't have a big budget to buy a polyjet printer, so your idea is our very savior. We are trying to use dual extruder printer. One nozzle will do the color printing using your genious method and the other nozzle will print soluble support. Can you modify the plug in so that the last slot or "virtual nozzle" in Cura is always reserved for the second nozzle to print PVA? We very much appreciate your job. That would be perfect if we can print PVA and multicolor with a FDM machine.

[DatMinh94]