Multimaterial printing was not invented by BambuLabs, but love them or hate them the AMS has become the gold standard for a modern multi-material unit. [Daniel]’s latest Mod Bot video on the Box Turtle MMU (embedded below) highlights an open source project that aims to bring the power and ease of AMS to Voron printers, and everyone else using Klipper willing to put in the work.
The system itself is a mostly 3D printed unit that sits atop [Daniel]’s Voron printer looking just like an AMS atop a BambuLab. It has space for four spools, with motorized rollers and feeders in the front that have handy-dandy indicator LEDs to tell you which filament is loaded or printing. Each spool gets its own extruder, whose tension can be adjusted manually via thumbscrew. A buffer unit sits between the spool box and your toolhead.
Aside from the box, you need to spec a toolhead that meets requirements. It needs a PTFE connector with a (reverse) boden tube to guide the filament, and it also needs to have a toolhead filament runout sensor. The sensor is to provide feedback to Klipper that the filament is loaded or unloaded. Finally you will probably want to add a filament cutter, because that happens at the toolhead with this unit. Sure, you could try the whole tip-forming thing, but anyone who had a Prusa MMU back in the day can tell you that is easier said than done. The cutter apparently makes this system much more reliable.
In operation, it looks just like a BambuLabs printer with an AMS installed. The big difference, again, is that this project by [Armored Turtle] is fully open source, with everything on GitHub under a GPL-3.0 license. Several vendors are already producing kits; [Daniel] is using the LDO version in his video.
It looks like the project is well documented–and [Mod Bot] agrees, and he reports that the build process is not terribly difficult (well, if you’re the kind of person who builds a Voron, anyway), and adding the AFC Klipper Addon (also by [Armored Turtle]) was easy as pie. After that, well. It needs calibration. Calibration and lots of tuning, which is an ongoing process for [Daniel]. If you want to see that, watch the video below, but we’ll spoil it for you and let you know it really pays off. (Except for lane 4, where he probably needs to clean up the print.)We’ve featured open-source MMUs before, like the Enraged Rabbit Carrot Feeder, but it’s great to see more in this scene, especially something that looks like it can take on the AMS. It’s not the only way to get multimaterial– there’s always tool-changers, or you could just put in a second motion system and gantry.
It would be nice if you told us what AMS stands for and also why it is the gold standard / how does it compare to other standards?
I bought a dual filament in single nozzle out hotend for my ender 3 for 40 bucks. It just works out of the box and has had no problems for going on 4 years. If you need 3+ materials you can change one while the other is printing. There aren’t multiple heads to calibrate or be out of alignment. The prime tower is a bit of waste but not much. IMO a cheap simple solution should be what people should look to when upgrading to multi material.
I had to look it up as well – Bambu Lab AMS (Automatic Material System)
Thanks.
AMS stands for Automatic Material System.
The Boxturtle one is designed to have no compromises and is pretty expensive (and awesome).
There are many more, this one for example is really cheap (~40 bucks) https://github.com/lhndo/LH-Stinger/wiki/Pico-MMU and seems to work fine.
AMS is the name of BambuLabs multi-material system. It stands for something but nobody ever defines the acronym when they use it so it’s really just a name at this point and I’m not about to buck the trend. It was big news in the 3D printing world and everyone was talking about it for a while, so I guess I figured rehashing would be redundant. I guess I was wrong. Mea culpa.
It lets the single, non-mixing nozzle on BambuLabs printers print multi-material by automatically retracting and feeding filaments exactly like this Box Turtle unit does. It’s the “gold standard” because it is plug-and-play to an absurd degree. Plug it in, turn it on, and go.
BambuLabs is the reason you’re suddenly seeing those purveyors of flexi dragons at crafts fairs hawking multicolored prints. Simple and cheap isn’t easy and reliable enough for production; evidently, BambuLabs AMS is. You can take someone who has never seen a 3D printer, given them a BambuLab printer with the AMS, and come back a week later to a room full of multicolored tchotchkes and not a single failed print, because it’s just that easy.
BambuLabs is like the Apple of the 3D printing world (complete with high prices, and dubious ethics)– 3D printing for people who don’t want to fiddle with 3D printers.
$0.02 While I run hot and cold on Apple, Bambu is simply not the Apple of 3D printing, beyond maybe arrogance and – as you point out- “dubious ethics”. Bambu lacks the level of quality – in design, build, and especially execution- to justify that moniker.
While I don’t fault you for not knowing every acronym out there, I hate acronyms and I’m ignorant of most of them. Just do a search and get on with it. When the AMS first came out, just about every reviewer said what it stands for.
My guess was
AMS = All Modern Shit
and “BOX TURTLE” must be some kind of (recursive?) acronym too.
Regarding recent discussions on how “accessible” to the masses HaD should be: The title of this article is utter garbage – even to all tech savvy HaD reader who happen to not be that much into 3d printing.
Open ended question = the answer is probably no.
+ two nonsense words that mean nothing to most people
== epic clickbait?
you couldn’t even hide the UI on the screen grab?
There’s an option to enclose a Box Turtle and add Dryers to the resulting chamber to keep your stuff dry.
If I recall correctly from chatting on the Armored Turtle Discord, you can totally “stack” Box Turtle units because of the way the filament runs, so long as Klipper knows which filament is which, you just add one more split in the filament path and run both Turtles into it, ezpz.
It’s turtles all the way down!
That’s good to know, thank you very much.
And yet, no one has mentioned the Enraged Rabbit Carrot Feeder.
Except for the article, I now see. However, I still prefer ERCF.
Since it’s based for Voron, I hope I can use this for my Sovol SV08 :)
AMS … gold standard … say what?
I have two of them (X1 Carbon). They work decently well, but do have their issues. To call them a reference or simply the baseline for comparison I’ll grant, but “gold” or any other adjective denoting excellence – except in sales volume- is hyperbole and frankly incorrect.
Don’t misread my comments, the AMS is a solid value and is reasonably reliable. But if you use one regularly you will learn how to tear down and reassemble it … in your sleep. Also, as a true MMS system it is extremely wasteful. For embedding labels and similar it shines.
I also have really Prusa MMUs, which are simply painful. An MMU3, which works very well. Considering an ERCF for a whirl.
Boden == Bowden?
It is great but Bondtech INDX is going to be the better option you’ll see everywhere soonish.
Serious question…has anybody ever really needed their filament runout sensor ? On single filament machines?