A month ago we finished printing medical supplies for the hospitals here on Cebu Island. After 6 months of printing I could go back to print stuff for myself. A month before Covid I started 3D printing and I still had a lot of things to try out. One of them was printing in different colors. My Creality Ender 3 Pro can only print 1 color at a time. The more expensive printers have the possibility to use more colors, or you can use the Mosaic Palette. But those 2 are not fitting my budget. So I had the option of changing filament during printing.
But then I ran into the biggest problem ... I've used all my filament on printing the face shields and mask valves and finding filament in the Philippines is very hard. All the shops are sold out. So I had to stop printing.
Luckily my husband in Belgium sended me some spools. The box was picked up early march but it arrived just last week. Finally! So after all the unpacking was done and everything was stowed away (mostly food and some school materials for a local school I support) I could start playing with my printer.
If you have a 3D model, you first need to use a slicer to convert the model into G-code for your printer. It gives your printer the coordinates where to print. You also can adjust a lot of settings like the strength of your print, the type of infill, supports or not, ... In the past I did a lot of adjusting to the profiles as the results with the standard profiles are not that good. You can tweak so many things. So the first month I did a lot of experiments on settings and G-code.
Now I used an extra script in Cura (the slicer program) to change filament at a certain height. Now you tell to printer that he has to stop at layer X and then you can take out the original filament, load a new color and resume the printing.
I was really surprised that it was that easy. So now I'm making some magnets for the fridge in multiple colors. The only disadvantage of this system, is that you change the color for the whole layer. If you want to change just parts of the layer, you have no alternative as to go for the more expensive solutions. But hey, I'm still new to this and I'm really happy with my setup.
So That's it ... Time for a cold beer now 😄🍺