With color or multi material printing, waste has been a big issue. Given that this method of printing is in its infancy, I see a lot of room for improvement.
I understand concerns with throwing away filament especially the expensive stuff. For me, this is just part of how it works. I hope someday for better options like inline purge and splice with zero waste of any kind. Literally just hit print and get full color at 800-2200mms print speeds.
Yes. My mistake. I meant pressure advance. My point is there are ways to program solutions for many many things. To purge from black to white, one can lay down a line of white, then compare it against a second line of white and continue until there is no detectable color difference. That would be a very good purge. No AI would be required.
How do you “lay down a line of white” at layer 188? You need prime tower for that…or an AI that sets your slicer parameters to optimal for you. There are soooo many things people can print that it is impossible to pre-code a solution for every possible situation. When the slicer at the moment does not even know how to arrange object in decent manner, there no hope for multicolor printing optimization. We need to do that by hand for a long time still. And not all people are capable to do it. Hence, 3D printers are not PnP.
I’m fairly confident lidar has very little actual use, even in theory, now or in the future. People have been testing with it and looked it’s code and it sure looks like a gimmick to me.
My X1C is fantastic printer, best option at it’s price range! People should not expect too much of it. Someone said they should have bought dual extruder printer instead. Well, that would have worked until you want more than 2 colors. And I hear they are a pain to calibrate. You can always paint your prints!
You know in advance how many colors you will try, so it’s possible to determine the purge required by doing what I suggested. There is a routine being developed:
People should expect a lot from vendors or we end up with the stream of copy-cat printers before the Bambu.
I get your point. I mean you can literally do that. Print lines and play with numbers until you have purge and prime volumes based on your needs.
Remember, it’s gonna get complicated when you add infill and maybe objects as you go forward.
Myself, I got into 3d printing for color, and I have my own numbers I use.
You don’t. At least I think I understood. You load x color, then you unload the color, without doing any purge/prime you start printing and measure how long before it’s the color you want.
Obviously you Math at this point… Or just make adjustments until you get what you want.
I think that you can achive the same by just setting all purge volume to zero, and doing a single rectangular layer print using two colors
That prime object looks awesome. How do you change tower to objects please?
There’s going to be a remake of “The Purge” movie where 3D printed purge objects take over the world lol. 
Hehe. The AI brings them to life and Neo must stop them from getting out of the matrix and replicating 
In the slicer (with an AMS), you can tell it to change filament at layer 188 and again at layer 189 to accomplish this automatically. Screenshot is at layer 104 as an example.
Where did you get your fast code?
I would like to know how you purge into these objects as well?
Right click an object, on the menu you should see an option for flush or purge options… Inside that it will have the 3 options. One of the options is to purge to object.
I think you can also do it from the menu in object mode. I’m not sure though, I just right click objects for most things.
Cool, thanks for letting me know 
It is right where you said it would be. I could not find the option because the current build I was working on only had a single stl with only one color loaded. And yes, you can do it from the ‘object mode menu’. Good stuff. Thank you for the reply.
That’s good to know. I’ve never looked for it with a mono color print before.
I second the question: how do you change the prime tower to an object? A great idea. Jean
My two cents on this topic. I would argue that the single extruder + AMS setup is great for specific multicolor prints, ones that don’t need to change colors every layer, or even changes within the same layer.
A good example off the top of my head, is a dozen small RC car cones, you start with orange and lay down the base for all the cones, then it swaps to white and does several layers in white only across all the cones, swaps back to orange and does this just a handfull of times throughout the entire print.
In short, I think a single extruder is most appropriate for simple color prints where you only expect the AMS to swap filaments a few times. I researched this printer as well as the J1 as it’s a dual extruder and made the decision to forgo complex multicolor printing for all the benefits of this amazing X1 Carbon.
I’m not saying you can’t do it, but if that was your goal from the start, you probably didn’t pick the right printer for the job. I do like that everyone is trying to reduce the filament waste though, I’ll definitely pay close attention to the settings everyone is using and try to optimize as well.
There is no reason to waste more than needed, although the aggressive default setting ensures any material is purged without fail which is consistent with the “print successfully out of the box” idea.
