I’ve been printing with the H2C and noticed some inefficiencies during multicolor prints that might be reducible through firmware changes.
Left/right head switching
I’ve noticed the printer does the following dance:
- Move head to the back
- Switch heads
- Move head to wipe tower
- Heat up
Doing this all sequentially for every layer takes up a lot of time. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t it be possible to move the head position/blocker during the move towards the back (combining steps 1 and 2), somewhat reducing the head switching time?
Vortek color change
The printer does the following on every vortek nozzle change:
- Cut filament
- Retract filament to AMS while
- Use rack to switch nozzle
- Heat up while
- Push in new filament from AMS
I’ve noticed that some of these moves already happen in parallel (great!) but the filament retract/push in is the critical path that takes up the most time.
A significant amount of these nozzle changes however happen after printing with the left nozzle, meaning that the right nozzle has been idle for quite a bit. Wouldn’t it be faster to do the filament cut, retract and push new filament in up to the buffer while printing with the left head in these cases? That way the fast nozzle swap+heating becomes the critical path and we can see significant time reductions on prints.
Anyway, just my two cents (or suggestions).