We hope you’re as excited as we are about the launch of H2S. After all, H2S is more like the product everyone has been asking for over the past three years — essentially a bigger X1C.
But this launch also brings us a tough question: should we let everyone know that before the end of the year we’ll have another product in the H2 series, the H2C? If we announce it now, it will certainly hurt sales of H2D and H2S, and affect the company’s revenue, since H2C hasn’t even reached our warehouse yet, and news of a new model could make people hesitate to buy now. On the other hand, if we don’t say anything about H2C, many people might regret their purchase of H2D or H2S later. It’s really a difficult choice.
In the end, we decided to go ahead and share the existence of H2C with you, and also tell the story behind this product.
Let’s go back to the initial question: why do printers “poop” in the first place?
It’s simple — to clean the nozzle from leftover melted filament. When you try to print different colors with a single nozzle, it’s basically like painting with just one brush. Every time you switch colors, you need to wash the brush so the old paint doesn’t mess up the new one. It’s the same with 3D printing: you have to purge the nozzle before switching filaments.
Now, what if we could skip that tedious cleaning step? In painting, you’d just use multiple brushes, each dedicated to one color. But in a printer, what’s the real equivalent of a “brush”? Is it the whole gantry? The toolhead? The hotend assembly? Or just the nozzle itself? Every choice has its pros and cons — and that’s why this race is so interesting.
The contamination only happens at the nozzle, but the nozzle doesn’t work alone. It needs the motion system, filament feeding, heating, and temperature sensing, all wired into the printer. Disconnecting and reconnecting those systems during a nozzle switch is a reliability nightmare. The more components you swap as a package, the fewer connections you need to worry about — but that comes with a larger footprint and higher cost. The less you swap, the cheaper and smaller things get, but the harder it is to be reliable. In the end, it’s always a trade-off between reliability and footprint.
Here’s a quick tour of the options:
Plan A: Swap the whole gantry. Straightforward, no connectors to worry about. The catch: you need a full gantry for each nozzle, which makes it expensive and bulky. This is the IDEX approach — usually limited to just two nozzles.
Plan B: Swap only the toolhead, while sharing the same motion system. This saves cost and space, but you now have to deal with mechanical connectors between the gantry and the toolhead. Toolheads are still bulky, so you can’t fit too many of them. This is the “tool changer” approach, seen in products from E3D, Prusa, and later Snapmaker.
Plan C: Swap only the hotend assembly. That way you share the motion system, extruder, and cooling, which saves even more space and cost. But then you face the headache of connecting all the power and signal cables for heating and temperature sensing. A pogo pin connector works in demos, but making it reliable over millions of cycles is a whole other story.
Plan D: The simplest idea — if you trust thermal conductivity at the interface, you could heat and measure temperature from the toolhead side, like in the A1 nozzle. Then you’d only switch the bare nozzle and heatsink. The challenge is ensuring consistent thermal conductivity, especially when the nozzle needs to be changed thousands of times more often than on an A1.
We could keep going with Plan E, F, and beyond, but let’s stop here. In 2023, we decided Plan C was the sweet spot — the right balance between reliability and footprint — as long as we could crack the connectivity problem.
Our secret? Ditch the mechanical connectors and go wireless. Induction heating can already heat the nozzle wirelessly, but heating alone isn’t enough — you also need to measure the temperature. Our solution was to design a custom microcircuit on the hotend that receives power, measures temperature, and communicates wirelessly with the toolhead. It might not sound fancy on paper, but making it robust, reliable, and certifiable took a ton of engineering and know-how. In the end, this integrated approach let us shrink the hotend assembly down to just four parts: nozzle, heatbreak, thermistor, and a compact PCB — all packed into just 10 grams and a 20 × 15 × 56 mm form factor.
Wireless heating and communication solved one big problem, but positioning the nozzle precisely was another. It’s not enough to just switch nozzles — they have to land in exactly the right spot, with micrometer precision, every single time, across every printer we ship. Otherwise, you’ll see defects and scars on your prints. Achieving that requires either extremely repeatable mechanics, a fast and accurate measurement system, or ideally both.
And then there’s software. Embedded firmware, slicer integration, user interface — all of it. Customers often underestimate how much software matters, and honestly, so did we at first. That’s why, even after the hardware design was locked months ago, we still weren’t ready to ship. The reality of product development is staring at piles of finished printers waiting for software polish, and asking yourself: “Should we launch now, or wait?”
After three years of R&D, though, we’re finally confident. We’ll be ready to ship the H2C by the end of 2025.
Before wrapping up, here’s one last question we know many of you will ask: Can I upgrade my H2D to an H2C?
The answer is yes — but it does require some skill, patience, a willingness to carefully follow instructions and a few hours of your time. It’s definitely more involved than swapping out a clogged nozzle and we would not encourange entry level customer to do it. Can I upgrade my H2S to an H2C, well, technically you can, but we post this blog just to make sure you do not have to waste your time and budget in doing it.
Watch the Vortek System video here to get the full story.
For more information about the Vortek System, click here
Also did you mean to write that you went with Plan D? The video is showing that.