Hi All, It's finally time to move on to the next big thing (yet to be announced.) And as always, that means it's time to retire the Mk4 and release it as a fully open source project. We've published all the files, source code and sample profiles on our GitHub page here: https://github.com/3DChameleon/3DChameleonMk4 Feel free to take it, modify it, extend it, improve it, incorporate it into your designs, sell it... whatever you want! I'd love nothing more than to see you make 3D printing even more beautiful. When I started the 3DChameleon over 8 years ago, no one had a multi color solution. We set out to change that... shortly, we had a competitor or two, but no real big changes... but recently, finally, that has changed with a wave of new products from most of the major vendors. Jo's team at Prusa were always right there with the greatest software ever, and with their deep knowledge of what is actually needed, they started their own ecosystem of software "clones" or forks of their software... that's lead to all the machine vendors finally realizing how easy it is to implement their own hardware solutions. Bambu kicked off a great wave and now everyone is rushing to copy them. Some might think this is a bad thing, but I'm on the opposite side... this is the single greatest thing that FDM printing has needed to spur growth, especially in the color world. New ideas and products, like Jason Preuss' Color Lithophane Maker and HueForge have also triggered much greater interest and have shown that color printing can be much more beautiful than simply just swapping colors. I've been in the 3D Printing business for many decades, and have been involved with desktop (home) printing since the very inception by building my own RepRap Darwin over 15 years ago. I have a first batch Makerbot Cupcake, and subsequently invented polar coordinate printing (including founding Polar3D, where we sold 1000s of printers into school systems all over the world), I developed continuous printing with the "infinite Z" belt printers, and also developed the first color changing 3DChameleons, back in the day when it was "ok" to pull the plug on live stepper motors... using mechanical switches. Well... now it's time to retire this venture (sort of...) and let it be free. Don't worry, I'm most definitely not leaving this site or this community... the next product will also be under the 3DChameleon brand and just like I do with all the previous projects, I'll still remain heavily involved in supporting it and helping others grow it. So many of you have purchased the 3DChameleon and given feedback, extended it, supported it, made your own... gosh, I just can't say enough good things about each and every one of you... it's been awesome, and I can't wait to see how far it goes. Hopefully, larger brands will take it up and run with it. (I might add, we're already seeing it... with at least two very large name brands implementing their own versions of it.) Anyway, stay tuned for what's next... I guarantee, it's not what you expect... I've always been one to push the bounds of technologies and our next product will follow suit and be even more revolutionary. Bill NOTE: I've had numerous questions on what this means for the add-ons. They're still in play... I have not said that I was stopping development of it... this just gives me time to not make any more and devote my time to improving the system. There are four major items in the works... 1) The expansion capability... if you look at the GitHub page, you'll see the code already had been completed to allow for the Sparkfun I/O expansion as well as the Filament Runout sensors... this also enables the auto calibration feature by adding the necessary I/O for the filament position sensors. 2) The auto calibration... with the addition of the hardware expansion support, the auto calibration is just a software change. There are numerous ways of accomplishing this and documenting them all is taking a lot of time. 3) We're also going to offer two new ways of installing it... one is to use the direct feed method we used to have... which requires no software changes, but can use an optimized firmware. This will allow the 3DChameleon to act as the extruder, but without requiring any post processing like it previously used to. The second way of installing it will be to use independent motors for all 4 extruders instead of the switcher... this will allow Klipper based printers to drive them directly. Both of these options are fully developed and just need documenting. 4) New options for electronics. The firmware will be tunable for supporting two additional off the shelf Arduino based boards, the Arduino CNC Shield and the Arduino Nano CNC Shield. This will allow anyone to source their electronics from very inexpensive sources. The CNC Nano Shield can be purchased complete for $6... and can be used as a direct replacement for our electronics with some minor firmware changes. The Arduino CNC Shield (with 4 steppers) can be used instead of the 3DChameleon to drive 4 independent extruders (BMG Clones recommended) to drive through our Y adapter and 3DClippy filament cutter. This work is already complete (and operational) as well and just needs documenting.

Here are the schematics for our main board. Pretty simple design based of the Arduino Uno. All the pins are using the Uno's pin labelling in this schematic, but not the pin numbering, be aware of that. You can also use a CNCNano board to replace these electronics, but they'll have different pin mappings... but should be pretty easy to duplicate the board if you wanted to. More details coming soon. There are no restrictions on using this (simple) design... it's now in the public domain. Bill

Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic9dLWOwyYM These spool winders look a lot easier to make than the older versions... the spring is entirely printed, as well. Needs eight M3x8 screws, eight M3 nuts and four 08 skate bearings... everything else is printed. https://www.printables.com/model/292276-auto-rewind-spool-holder-for-reprack Bill

I've had to turn on full moderation on the site. It seems that 1000s of bots are attacking it and posting porn links and various other spam messages. I've blocked all the account that I can find and removed all the content, but over the last few days, I've literally removed 1000s of these messages from about 100 accounts. Once the attack dies down, I'll resume the creation of accounts and posting without moderation. Bill

Hey Folks, someone requested that we create a printer specific installation section and I thought that this was a fantastic idea. I know there are 100s of different types of printers out there, so this forum is for you to create and document the specifics for your own printers... you findings, your 3d models, printer profiles, etc. Please create one for your printer, unless of course, someone has already created it for that printer... then simply add your information to it. Bill

It's just come to my attention that OrcaSlicer has broken their multi-material support in a big way. Let me start off by saying that we only officially support PrusaSlicer, and only test on PrusaSlicer. There are other slicers that are forks of PrusaSlicer (like SuperSlicer, BambuStudio, OrcaSlicer and others) that sometimes work and sometimes don't. However, we DO NOT test with them, nor do we intend to. We test 100s of printers a year in their stock configuration. We also DO NOT test variations of those printers, for example, aftermarket hotends or extruders, regard less of how popular they are. The number of variations are too huge to be able to support that. We have a generic set of design requirements and software support to be able to cover any printer out there. Where there is no PrusaSlicer software support for a printer (like a proprietary printer), we will make every attempt to help out, but can't guarantee that it will work. Our stated requirements for "any printer" are that it can use PrusaSlicer's Custom Tool Change GCode and that it uses 1.75mm filament. If those two conditions are met, then it's 99.9+% chance that the 3DChameleon will work for you. Asking that we support others is simply not an option, regardless of how popular a product/slicer is. If that slicer has a technical limitation that prevents it from working, for example, like Cura does, then there is nothing that we are able to do to fix it. This is also true for hardware, for example, we do not support Titan or SeeMeCNC extruders, and recommend you change those to better designs. If a printer supports open source slicers, then there is always a PrusaSlicer solution for it, as it's by far the most open slicer there is, and they're the only ones that are fully committed and continuously advancing our ability to do color printing. I don't know why the forks of PrusaSlicer are changing key features from the base platform, or limiting it for some reason, but if you encounter an issue with one of them, I highly recommend you go to their Github pages and post an issue to help get them to resolve it. Bill

Hey All, I just discovered a bug in the Tool Change GCode for both Mode 2 and Mode 3. The issue was a change recently made to the tool change gcode which lowered the temperature for the Creality K1 printers, but which effected all printers. There is a "Prevent Cold Extrusion" function built into some firmwares that caused the machine to not move the filament when it was commanded because the temperature was too low. The fix is very simple, simply add "M302 S0" as the very first line of the Start GCode as well as the End GCode... and then add "M302 S180" as the last line of the Start GCode as well as the End GCode. The M302 command is used to tell the printer to ignore cold extrusions. If you're running Klipper, you'll need to set the "min_extrude_temp" value to 140 in your config file. Bill

With Kiri:Moto and Cura, the Mk2 GCode Generator is used for the Mk3, however, the code needs to be edited to support the new button press scheme. Attached are two text files, the "Start" or "Select" Gcode files and the "End" or "Deselect" GCode. In each file, you'll see a block of gcode labeled Mk2 and another block labeled Mk3. You can use the Mk2 GCode generator with your specific machine settings in it to generate the Mk2 code... you'll then use these two files as a template to edit your generated code to match these text files... basically, you're changing the button press codes by replaceing the Mk2 blocks in your files with the Mk3 blocks in these sample text files. You'll then paste them into the extruders start and end (or Kiri:Moto's Select and Deselect) gcode blocks. You need to do that to all 8 of the blocks. Note, the end gcode is always the same for all 4 extruders, but the loading is only different by how long you press the button (to get to 1, 2, 3 or 4 pulses.) Bill

Here's a new version of the 3DClippy filament cutter that allows for a vertical orientation. It's installed on the SV-06, but can easily be adapted to other printers, like those equipped with the Creality Sprite extruder, for example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHTxQTIqE2o And you can download the files here: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/gxoYUu1SaSA-3dclippysovolsv06 This eliminates the need to do any tip shaping, which can a) reduce the headache of trying to get a particular filament to work correctly, and b) can speed up the whole process significantly. It's totally open source, so please, take it and adapt it to your own printers... just make sure you share the design for others to use! Enjoy! Bill

The 3D Chameleon uses a spring tension cam mechanism using a small 2.5mm x 10mm spring and a 100% solid infill 3D Printed part with a "B" imprinted on it. That part can wear over time, or in the the worst case, can actually break. If that occurs, you can print out a new part using this file. You can print it with 100% infill using either PETG or PLA. Here's the file: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5181728

If you're using a printer with multiple physical extruders, there is an issue with the latest version of PrusaSlicer in that they're no adding a Tool (T{extuder}) command AFTER the tool change gcode is inserted. The issue is that our code is changing it to the selected code in our Tool Change, and they're then overriding it. There doesn't appear to be a way around it in their settings, so I wrote this little post processor that switches all T{extruder} commands back to T0. (If you have the 3D Chameleon on another extruder, simply edit the code to replace the T0 with your specific extruder number.) Attached is the code... simply use the following post processor command to run it: "C:/Program Files/Python38/python.exe" C:\Users\Username\Desktop\T0Only.py Be sure to replace the Username with your correct username, and use the correct location for your installation of Python.

Hi Folks, On the Ender 3 V2, the normal switch mount has the switch too far towards the back of the printer. Under normal circumstances, that doesn't effect anything, but if you have an automatic bed level sensor added to it, then the two will interfere with each other. I now have my switch at 230mm on the Y axis by making a new custom switch holder for the Ender 3 V2 that extends it further forward to allow for printers with ABL as well. You can find it here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4663605 (Look in the files for the Ender 3 V2 specific one.) Bill

Please feel free to ask any questions, post your creations or help others out! Bill