Make a Color Picker With Your Mix-color 3D Printer!
Introduction: Make a Color Picker With Your Mix-color 3D Printer!
Have you ever wondered how many colors your mix-color 3D printer can produce? I started with blue, red and yellow and began a color-mixing experiment.
I wanted to start each color combo with a 0%:100% mix and end at 100%:0%. There would be 14 virtual extruders in between, each having a different mix ratio. I wanted to enter this in an Instructables Contest, so I decided to go for it!
While conducting my experiment, I put together some ZIP files that you can download and use to Make a Color Picker With Your Mix-color 3D Printer using Ultimaker Cura open-source slicing software. This instructable will go through the steps to print your color picker using Cura 4.10 on a Windows 10 computer.
Supplies
* FFF (aka FDM) 3D printer with two extruders and a mixing nozzle
* 3D printer filaments (2 colors)
Step 1: Things to Consider Before You Begin
What Is a Mix-color 3D Printer? It's a 3D printer that can extrude more than one filament at the same time combining them in a single hotend. These printers are popular for producing fancy gradients.
This instructable will demonstrate how a mix-color printer can also output many different blends of colors, making it even more indispensable! If you don't have a dual extrusion 3D printer with a mixing nozzle, then this instructable won't work for you! I use the Geeetech A10M. It has a 2-in-1-out (aka 2-1) hotend like this:
How to Choose Two Filaments: By the end of this instructable you will have made a 3D color picker that you can use whenever you want to print a mixed color. It's easiest to use filaments that have the same properties, rather than mixing different materials. For this reason you might choose two colors having the same specs from the same reliable manufacturer.
You'll get a better assortment of hues at the lighter end of the spectrum! The more opaque filaments don't do as well as the semi-translucents. When I make my next color picker, I won't use the heavily pigmented colors! Look at all of these same reds and blues!
I repeated the steps in this instructable with three different filament combinations: blue/red, red/yellow, and yellow/blue. Depending on your printing production, you might choose to mix green/white or pink/red. What about clear/blue? The possibilities are nearly endless!
Slicer Settings: You should have some experience and knowledge beforehand with respect to the best settings for your 3D printer and materials to achieve a good print. If you don't know your best settings, there are many, many resources and test prints available online to help you get started right away!
Limitation: For me, any interruption in print badly affected my mixing results. 807
In my first attempt, I had tried to print the E1 mix percentage number into each piece, but with printing the number walls and then filling around them, I got "unmixed" results. The partially unblended colors look kind of cool, but, for my color-picker I wanted each piece to be closer to a solid color. I also wanted a printed hole. But, printing with the longest lines possible at slow speed seemed to be the best way to go. I would drill a hole after printing. Turning my models into shapes with no details worked well, but this really restricts what we can make with mixed color.
Patience: Depending on your available RAM, the virtual machine could take awhile to load into Cura. If the is spinning, try waiting.
Time: With the unchanged custom profile loaded, the print is estimated to take 1h 42m. You can certainly change settings to speed this up. Up the printing speed of the primers in Cura's Per Model Settings. Just be sure your extruder can keep up. If your extruder can't output the correct amount of material per prime, you'll get something like this:
Presumed:
* That you know how to download and install software.
* That you know how to extract the contents of a ZIP file to a specific location.
* That your 3D printer is calibrated, leveled and ready to go!
As of July 19, 2021, the so-called "mixing nozzle" doesn't actually mix anything. After reading through several blogs and reports, I learned that, in summary, there are no hotends available on the market which actively mix filaments. Some designs have been thought up and some are in development. 729