Lets guess how prusa's new MMU works

He is a link to the announcement.

They didnt detail the new unit yet. But they did day the bowden is gone and you can use 5 colors instead of 4.

 

It looks like its feed to the extruder and cut to add the next color. And it also looks like the feeder moves along the x axis, maybe to keep the feeder tube shorter?

 

Any ideas?

Dang they have been busy!

To me it looks like the top assembly is a filament selector that will move a feeder gear to the filament of choice and push it down to the main extruder, then disengage. It would probably also handle long retracts for filament changes. With this system amount of colors is only limited by firmware capabilities.

Youre probably right. I think a cut system would be better than a retract, the blob on the end causes lots of jams. Some times its hard for me to change out filiament on my mk2 because of it.

"We are also finishing a rewrite of the MMU smart wipe tower which will enable using the waste material as an infill ?"

That’s cool too.

It looks like the main extruder motor stays on the X axis, there are clearly two motors on the upper part. One to move between filaments (right, in that photo), and one to maybe feed the filament down the tube to the extruder?

I wonder if they change the filament down at the nozzle (and retract all of it, all the way out), or if they push the new color ahead of time (cutting it at the top), at about the right time for a filament change. There was an aftermarket product that would do that, it would see a filament change coming in 10cm (of filament) and it would cut, switch, and weld the filaments together, and then it would just go into your printer like regular filament.

It cuts! As confirmed by hackaday. No word on welding tho…

 

Basically a cheap palette.

Glitter printer? Thanks, now how am I going to sleep?

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The glitter printer was directly across from us…Glitter everywhere, and on everyone. When the laser was firing the little glitter mirrors reflected it everywhere. Like trying to sinter a disco ball so it made adhesion a bit tricky and not as defined as it could be but it is still early in his material tests.

I tried to go look at the prusa multi but the one chance I had I guess it was in the conference room at the time. The E3D beast had what looked like a full PC built in the back of it to keep it running.

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