I’ve been thinking about a 3d printer filament buffer for a while, but haven’t really made the time to actually solve this problem, mostly because my multi-material printing has, to date, been pretty minor.  That’s not to say I haven’t been using my MMU, only to say that so far my prints have primarily needed tens of tool changes rather than hundreds.  At this scale, my “non-buffer” buffering solution worked reasonably well.  I’ve only had one or two jams, and it wasn’t that big of a deal.  Well, I decided to try a “big” project, and printed some miniatures with soluble supports which resulted in 216 tool changes.  This, I found, is why the filament buffer exists. Continue reading The Filament Buffering Problem →