3D Printer Tool Changer Gives You Access To Lots Of Extruders

The benefits of having a 3D printer with multiple extruders are numerous: you can print soluble support material for easy removal, print a combination of flexible and rigid filament, or simply print in different colors. Unfortunately, traditional multi-extruder setups have some serious drawbacks, even aside from the cost.

Usually, the extruders are all mounted next to each other on a single carriage. This increases the mass, which can cause print quality issues like shadowing. It also reduces the printable area, as each extruder needs to be able to reach the entire area. All of this means that the design becomes more and more impractical with each extruder you add, and that’s why it’s uncommon to see more than two extruders on a printer.

Over on Hackaday.io, [rolmie] has come up with a very practical (and affordable) solution to this problem. He has designed a tool changer that gives the printer the ability to switch out hot ends on the fly. The system is very similar to the tool changers we see on CNC machining centers: tools (the hotends) are stored on a rack, and a tool change in the G-code sends the carriage over to the rack to drop off the old hotend and pick up a new one.

The benefit of the design is that both the mass and volume of the carriage are kept to a minimum, while allowing you to use many different hot ends. Each hotend’s settings can be configured individually, and you can even use different models of hotend altogether (maybe one model works better for PLA, while another is better for ABS). The design is still in the prototyping stage and needs some refinement, but it’s a very promising proof of concept that seems like it could be implemented fairly easily into most 3D printer models.

39 thoughts on “3D Printer Tool Changer Gives You Access To Lots Of Extruders

    1. This is the biggest question I have. Even with the alignment pins that the head seems to be using, the position of the nozzle seems like it could have a big enough variation to cause print problems. This is why other solutions end up using fixed heads or swapping the filament at the extruder.

      1. i was thinking about that as well but maybe there is an internal calibration happening on the software side you know like telling the printer tool 2 has an offset of X compared to tool 1 (reference) or something..

    1. In order for that to be possible you’d need a free tool slot. In any case generally tool change moves are handled by the firmware and not in the gcode. The gcode tool change command only selects what tool to use, though you can insert custom moves before and after the tool change sequence in many slicers.

      1. As of now, the slicer (Cura) creates the moves to change the tool as it provides more flexibilty than the firmware, eg. wait for heating up while the tool is still in the rack or do use speed settings from the slicer, or in future purging filament which requires knowledge about retraction length and speed

  1. Equip the hot ends with quick boost heating while they’re in the rack. When the gantry comes over and plugs into a different hot end, hit it with some higher volts/amps for a short bit. Of course it’d need a monitoring system.

    1. I had a magnetic lock in the beginning, but figured that it is not necessary, friction is doing a good job. I tested with acceleration of 2000 mm/s² (0.2g) up to 250mm/s..

  2. Hey can you please tell how tool changing software works is it in filmware or do you send g code for tool change in slicer and what exactly you use like how tool changer know which tool to place down to pick up new one what will happen if multiple tools are there like how will printer know which tool to undock in order to dock another

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