I’m coming from a Prusa that had an MMU (multi-material unit, like the AMS). Prusa didn’t have a way to dump those little balls of leftover material, so when printing a multi-color layer, it needed to store the leftover of color 1 before switching to color 2. It used a wipe tower.
Now I know that BambuStudio is based on PrusaSlicer, but why does Bambu need a wipe tower, when it has the ability to discard the leftover material in those little balls of filament that get dumped out the back of the machine? Shouldn’t one only need one or the other of these places to dump extra material?
Also, has anyone made a nice model of a box or something to catch those little poops of filament? I’m using a cut up cardboard box that some filament came in, but I was just curious if others have figured out nicer solutions.
From some of my discussions with tech support, it seems things like the purge tower is left on by default even though it is not needed. Probably left overs from the fork from the PrusaSlicer. You can disable the purge tower in the Global Process/Others/Prime tower.
The tower is also not needed when doing smooth time lapse even though it reports possible problems if you disable it.
The tower isn’t only used for purging leftover filament in between swaps. It also builds pressure back up in the nozzle, similar to the initial purge lines that start every print.
It’s enabled by default because it provides a better overall print quality. You can disable it, and there are some types of prints that will work just fine without it, but also some that will have quality issues - bumps, over extrusion in spots, etc. It’s up to the user to figure out which works best for them.
Thanks everyone! I didn’t realize the purpose of the wipe tower. Very interesting. It would also seem that without a wipe tower the slicer could do some/all of the infill before the perimeters, which could help with rebuilding extrusion pressure (which I never knew was a thing).
I had the same question and am also using a cut up reel box. I guess it might make sense to print one but I’m not sure it is worth it since the cardboard one works OK.