Two extruders for one Duet2 Wifi

mihaitintea

Hello

I want to easily swap between an E3D V6 0.4 mm and an E3D Volcano 0.8 mm, in my delta printer.

I do not want to disassemble the print head, or to unplug anything from the Duet board, when I want to do such a swap. For this reason I purchased duplicates for every component used to build a print head: Delta Smart Effector with magballs, bowden extruder with motor, PTFE tubing, temperature sensors, E3D kit, and I built separate duplicate cabling for everything.

All cables for both sets of Effector+Extrudercould be left simultaneously attached to the Duet board, permanently, since the Duet board has multiple slots which could be simultaneously occupied.

The only shortcoming in this is that the Z-Probe connector on the Duet board is unique, and therefore this is the only place where I could be forced to physically swap the cables, although a method with multiple mechanical 2-state switches could be thought of.

When swapping between the two Delta Smart Effectors, I would just reconfig the config.g file and reboot.

That is, for instance, this is how I define some of the setting in config.g (there are more but here are just a few):

M569 P0 S1 ; Physical drive 0 goes forwards (42BYGHM810)
M569 P1 S1 ; Physical drive 1 goes forwards (42BYGHM810)
M569 P2 S1 ; Physical drive 2 goes forwards (42BYGHM810)
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
M569 P3 S0 ; Physical drive 3 extruder 0 goes backwards
M569 P4 S1 ; Physical drive 4 extruder 1 goes forwards

M350 X16 Y16 Z16 E16:16 I1 ; Configure microstepping with interpolation

M92 X200 Y200 Z200 E436.8:438 ; Set steps per mm

M566 X1200.00 Y1200.00 Z1200.00 E1200.00:1200.00 ; Set maximum instantaneous speed changes (mm/min)
M203 X18000.00 Y18000.00 Z18000.00 E1200.00:1200.00 ; Set maximum speeds (mm/min)
M201 X3000 Y3000 Z3000 E3000:3000 ; Set accelerations (mm/s^2)
M906 X1900.00 Y1900.00 Z1900.00 E1900.00:1300.00 I60 ; Set motor currents (mA)

I use Cura 4 for slicing.

What I need help for:

how to correctly define the tools in the config.g file of the Duet ?
How to tell Cura that I have the hardware configuration like described above ?
What custom gcode do I need to tell Cura to put at the beginning and at the end of the generated gcode ?

Thanks in advance

T3P3Tony

@mihaitintea

With the setup you describe you don't need to edit config.g between each change. I would setup one of the extruders as tool 0 and the other as tool 1 and then just select T0 or T1 as you need.
I think cura can be configurered with multiple tools, and then just select 1 specific tool for the whole print, depending which hotend you want to use.
Define the tools as shown here: https://duet3d.dozuki.com/Wiki/Gcode#Section_M563_Define_or_remove_a_tool

You should be able to connect the smart effect to the E0 or E1 endstop and configure it as a simple switch, however you will then not be able to update the sensitivity of the smart effector. it is unlikely you will need to do this, and if you do you can set it using the z probe port and then swap back to the endstop. Think of the smart effector connected to the endstop as a simple switch: https://duet3d.dozuki.com/Wiki/Connecting_a_Z_probe#Section_Microswitch

the only bit that will require a bit of customising is using a different Z probe for each tool. Possibly setup a macro to sun the Z probe setup lines you would notmally have in config.g for the other tool as part of your manual tool change.