Summary: Please give us back the ability to set the purge tower filament volumes so we can control the purge tower footprint area. The purge tower footprint grows in area with each added color and encroaches significantly into the available model print area.
(I called it purge tower but I think it’s actually prime tower? It’s the tower that readies the extruder for printing after a filament change.)
I’ve been hanging back on Studio and X1C firmware versions for communications but hit a major issue recently uploading projects to MakerWorld. My 3mf files were routinely getting rejected in verification because g-code was outside of the print area and the uploader suggested using the latest version of Studio.
Thinking it would show me what was wrong, I upgraded to the latest version. It didn’t show me what was wrong or allow my files to upload but I think I figured out what happened.
It used to be we could control the volume of filament used in each pass in the purge tower which would also control the footprint area. That ability seems gone now with a fixed volume assumed. All we can do (it seems) is trade off length by width with the area being fixed. Under the new way, each added filament grows the prime tower footprint and the more colors the less remaining area for the models. In my case I’m printing 240mm round multicolor prints and once you hit 6 colors they don’t fit.
To upload my models now, I have to disable the purge tower completely and there is no way to re-enable it (without footprint issues) in newer versions of Studio - at least that I am aware of.
What would be nice would be to get control over the purge volume again. If I can reduce that, it reduces the purge tower footprint. For my purposes, I don’t need to worry about it tipping over as my prints are 40mm tall max but any color changes are over by 4mm height max.
Uploads failed verifying with both the old and new versions of Studio until the purge tower was disabled in both. That seems to be the rub. The uploader and new Studio both seem to assume some fixed volume to purge with instead of allowing us to configure them like that.