Color Mixer garbage?

[Sindicoro]

I've tried using the color mixer and it has resulted in multiple weak or outright failed prints with some printing in midair.

Are there certain settings I should be using with this? Do I have to increase my feed rates to compensate for it? Zero retractions? Why is this thing even a separate program instead of plugins so it can actually work with all the other settings you can end up with in your print?....

[William]

Hi,You cannot enable z hop in the imported gcode, otherwise it may affect the printing effect. If you are printing in the air, you need to check whether your hot end is blocked. If it is blocked, you need to clean up in time.

[Sodium100mg]

I've not used the color mixer, because I'm not making decorative pieces, but I have looked at it.

The color mixer application appears to be something that somebody threw together in a day. The program reads in a gcode file and counts Z moved. Then based the parameters adds three M163 commands for 3 color or two commands 2 colors and an M164 command and sets the color.

Code: Select all

; feature prime pillar
G1 Z0.400 F1002 <- z move that triggered the adding of commands
M163 S0 P0.01 <- added
M163 S1 P0.49 <- added
M163 S2 P0.5 <- added
M164 S0 <- added
G1 X99.216 Y125.428 F4800 <- resume normal code.

With how simple the program is, I can't see how it could mess up anything. My best theory as to what went wrong was the other color wasn't primed through the nozzle and when the color swapped, it left a void.

One thing you can check is to open the produced g-code in a slicer program that lets you view the code and see if anything looks strange.

[Sindicoro]

With how simple the program is, I can't see how it could mess up anything. My best theory as to what went wrong was the other color wasn't primed through the nozzle and when the color swapped, it left a void.

One thing you can check is to open the produced g-code in a slicer program that lets you view the code and see if anything looks strange.

This is exactly what happens because it doesn't maintain any pressure of the other two or prime them in any way. I could try using a wipe tower when I plan to use this even though one shouldn't be required. In all of the attempts I've done at using this program on things I've sliced it always ends up a mess or the part crumbles in certain sections when I go to remove it from the glass plate. At least maybe the wipe tower will eat up the weak points...

[Sindicoro]

Nope, tower didn't work either...

[Sodium100mg]

The first rule of troubleshooting is to *cut the problem in half*.

I'd take the color mixer program out of the equation and setup a file that does a hard color shift from the teal to the red. If it is a hardware issue, something similar bad could happen.

Another interesting test would be to reverse the color mixer, starting with red and shifting to teal.

You can test the filaments by swapping them around or trying a different filament.

I openly admit I don't know anything, but my gut feeling is that the head assembly might somehow be loose/shifting, so when the color switches, there is a different pressure on the head, which is shifting the nozzle location just enough for things not to align. So in the first test, I'd expect the problem to happen without color mixer. The second test might indicate if the the direction of the shift, where it might looked compressed rather than a gap.

The reason I think something shifted is that everything else is looking fine, then boom, it looks bad. Take a good look at the plastic where the color changes. Try to see what happened.

[Sindicoro]

Hard color changes work great. I've printed a few really nice things so far using all three and a wipe tower. Adding the color mixer is where things break, which I also checked the gcode since the items I've tried it on are supposed to start at layer 1 but always start at 25 for some reason... yep, no 163's until 25. I'm going to try manually editing the gcode to set up a few virtual heads and doing a 166 gradient to see how that works out. Might just manually do the things I want and skip this program entirely.

[Sodium100mg]

Yes, color mixer is junk, but that doesn't answer the question as to why? I'm a programmer (among other things) and I keep getting tempted to hack gcode in a similar manor as color mixer.

In simplify3d, the prime tower has not setting, so at the very least I'd like to remove the top layers of the tower, where it isn't changing colors anymore and also be able to vary the size of the blocks, so switching from white to red would print a larger area than going from white to red, where a few percent of red in the white is visible, while a few percentage of white in red isn't visible.

As the point a program can create and tune the tower, adding color mixing would be simple. It should be able to mix 2 or 3 colors.

With the toothpaste effect on color mixing, color mixing will always be part voodoo.

[Sindicoro]

Slic3r (I use PrusaSlicer) has a feature where you can have a wipe tower at a different Z height than your object (less waste) and only wipe on color changes. I haven't tried that yet, but for full height wipe towers it just builds a framework until it gets to a color change layer and then does bridges to wipe the change. I haven't tried ending the wipe tower at the last color change... would be nice to save that material.

My first real attempt at M163, M164, and M166's is running now... I'll drop a pic when it's done if it's any good. I added these at their respective Z changes:


M163 S0 P0.90
M163 S1 P0.10
M163 S2 P0.00
M164 S4

M163 S0 P0.10
M163 S1 P0.90
M163 S2 P0.00
M164 S5

M166 A0 Z33.950 I4 J5 S1

M163 S0 P0.00
M163 S1 P0.90
M163 S2 P0.10
M164 S6

M163 S0 P0.00
M163 S1 P0.10
M163 S2 P0.90
M164 S7

M166 A34.100 Z68.000 I6 J7 S1


M163 S0 P0.10
M163 S1 P0.00
M163 S2 P0.90
M164 S8

M163 S0 P0.90
M163 S1 P0.00
M163 S2 P0.10
M164 S9

M166 A68.150 Z102.050 I8 J9 S1

[Sodium100mg]

I'm not sure if it relates to your problem, but I've been working with color changing and noticed my print had a similar looking problem. What I noticed was at the color switch, tool 0 retracted, the Z went up, then tool 1 started feeding, but didn't un-retract. tool 1 remained retractracted. as the print continued, tool zero starved out as tool 1 slowly fed in.

Had I been using a tower, I believe this could be prevented. The color mixer would blindly ignore retraction states.

With the way color mixer if blindly swapping colors, it could be messing up the retractions.

When I tested retraction distrance, I didn't see much difference, so my next test is to find the minimum retraction distance, so at least the filament would have a minimal distance to go, rather than a larger one. I believe I was at .6mm.

I also began some testing of manually operating the extruders and watching the filament push though. I even took the nozzle off and watched. It seemed that without retraction, the second color could pull a long string of the first through, where with retraction is gave a much cleaner color change, which makes me suspect that simplify3d is messing the color change between elements, like between structure and the body of the print.