I know that four AMS units need a AMS Hub to function, my question is - is it possible to daisy chain these things further using a bit of fudgery.
if you had one AMS hub and then plugged four AMS hub outputs into each of the inputs on this hub would you then be able to plug another 4 AMS units into the level two HUBS and feed in 4 * 4 filaments * 4 Hubs for a total of 64 filaments? or is that a pipe dream?
Whilst you could technically hook up more by daisy chaining, you are missing a fundamental issue.
The printer is the one changing the filament by talking to a known ID value within the GCODE of an AMS.
The AMS units are connected to each one and their ID values are passed along that bus.
The slicer only knows about a maximum of four AMS units.
You would have to get around the limit of the slicer to generate instructions for more than four AMS units, recode the GCODE to work with IDs the system doesn’t recognise and then use what would be relatively simple tubing to add more.
The only easy bit is really easy as BL sells a 4-in-1 adapter.
Again, this will take extensive work, and you may find the bus system has a hard limit that cannot be exceeded even if you manage all the other troublesome parts.
The two issues are power and software.
As long as you didn’t need for more than 4 of the 16 units for any one print job then all that would be required is some sort of electrical switching unit to switch in and out the required ams units.
Then following on from this - if you wanted to add more than one printer to the array of 16 ams’s you would need something to mechanically switch the output PTFEs between printers as well as the electrical connections.
In this case I was just thinking about multiple AMS units on one printer, not trying to create the printer equivalent of a KVM. It was just an idea I thought I’d float.
Actually I was just thinking about this 4 to 1 Bowden adapter that I saw, running 4 AMS units into that and then one out from that to the normal four way hub then the output from that into the printer input…
You could use a group of 16 AMS 4x4 per each connection on the 4 way adapter - that would give you 4 x 4 x 4= 64 Filaments - the only thing that would be required would be a software change - select AMS unit by ID select X filament on AMS unit - load.
All 64 Filaments could be laid out in Bambu labs showing you each AMS unit ( not caring where it is on the 4 to 1 adapter ) just showing an AMS group with serial number Unit1, - Filament 1, Filament 2, Filament 3, Filament 4, Unit 2… Because only one filament is loaded at a time they could rewind enough filament to take it back to the input of the 4 to 1 adapter and you would have four filaments which would load more quickly - one from each unit with only one filament passing through the 4 to 1 adapter and into the actual printer at anytime…
Tada 64 colours/filaments without much work
Ok, I may be wrong on this but I don’t think you need the AMS hub for 4 AMS units, I believe you can just use a 4 way Y splitter.
I Brought the hub because the web site said I would need it for multiple AMS units, in this case 4, but I also noted you add a Y a adapter with a manual bypass into the back of the printer.
What I am suggesting here is further expanding the Bambu printing landscape by giveing you the possability of running 16 AMS units which have 4 Quick Load filaments - and you can still have a Bypass - so effectively a mix of 64 colours and / or materials + a bypass if you don’t want to load from the AMS
Interesting Idea, and I would certainly like to have all of my filaments online if AMS’s were a little bit cheaper.
But re the Power issue I mentioned in my previous post - See these two Wiki entries
https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/general/power-consumption
My assumption from these two is that each AMS needs about 1W idle and 6W in use - so based on the fact that the AMS power setup has been sized for 4xAMS’s - then I guess the power available is a maximum of about 9 or 10w. Adding 12 more IDLE AMS’s - would add a requirement for about another 12w - which aside from the software issues, would also need some sort of switching or additional power injection.
That may indeed be the case, I hadn’t yet gotten that far, as far as the software goes the idea was to put each lot of 4 AMSs attached to the same AMS hub into an AMS group ( requiring - a software change ), 4 AMS groups would give 64 filaments ( type / colour ) There would also be a need to alter the firmware of the AMS units attached to this sort of setup as they would now go into a four to 1 bowden adapter which then connects to the printer and the filaments now instead of winding back to their individual hubs ( which is still ok ) would be better off if the mounted filament retracted only to the start of the bowden adapter.
If you wanted to still have bypass filament capability this would still allow for it and you would end up with a 5 to one Bowden adapter with the fifth input - probably the centre one for simplicity being used for the bypass
Just wondering what you would need 64 colors for?
Dare to dream.
Not even necessarily 64 colour’s, how about 16 colour’s in 4 different filament types - that’s one use case the other would be if you were running a 3D print company, either way the option of having more += better is not a bad one to have.
Ahh ok I see, I thought you were wanting 64 colors for 1 print
It could work but you’d really have to know which ams is what and which ones you can mix.
When the AMS’s are connected they get assigned an address 1 thru 4 so I don’t think it’s gonna work if 2 of them have the same address. I recently bought another X1C and connected one of the 3 I had to it. It all worked fine, but while I was setting up home assistant I couldn’t get the ams info as home assistant assumed it was address 1 when in fact it was still assigned address 3 in the unit.