To print in two colors with direct drive & Duet2WiFi
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@deathbydeltabot said in To print in two colors with direct drive & Duet2WiFi:
I've been running a Cyclops+ for the last few months. My tear stained diary is full of the challenges I've had and ultimately ended in failure. Full disclosure it's not entirely genuine, the nozzle and heater block are clones, the rest genuine. A lot of the tribal knowledge surrounding other mixing hotends (Diamond primarily) didn't apply to Cyclops+ in my experience. The biggest problem is that this hotend wasn't designed for mixing and has lots of extrusion irregularities when trying to mix (I confirmed this with E3D). It's possible that my clone heater block is faulty but I haven't decided if I want to put more effort into it, it's been a few months and attrition is setting in.
In regards to your extruder problem, have you seen this? https://www.bondtech.se/product/bmg-x2-extruder/ it's made specifically for Chimera/Cyclops (plus and non-plus)
well, if the heater block is not genuine you "loose" all the advantage of the new Cyclops+ because the block is the core of the system because it's the guide for the filaments....
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@the_dragonlord My genuine heater block and nozzle arrived yesterday, it's 100% genuine now. I did see some minor physical differences between the two. I ran the same gcode on both and unfortunately initial tests show the genuine block/nozzle performs exactly the same as the clone.
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@deathbydeltabot said in To print in two colors with direct drive & Duet2WiFi:
@the_dragonlord My genuine heater block and nozzle arrived yesterday, it's 100% genuine now. I did see some minor physical differences between the two. I ran the same gcode on both and unfortunately initial tests show the genuine block/nozzle performs exactly the same as the clone.
uh such a shame.... but if I didn't misunderstood you are printing mixing the filament, are you? in case why? Isn't the Cyclops made for printing one-per-time?
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@the_dragonlord said in To print in two colors with direct drive & Duet2WiFi:
.I've seen that Chimera on the other side has the great great advantage you don't need to set up a purge tower for every print and this saves a lot of filament...
Absolutely definitely and positively false! You need to purge on every filament change as the unused head drools the content of the melt chamber all over everything. If you don't purge you will print a whole bunch of nothingness until the melt chamber fills up again!
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@the_dragonlord When I got it, I mistakenly thought it could be used as a mixing hotend. It does work but it's unreliable. The problem I am running into with single color at a time is gaps between lines and I just can't get to the bottom of it. If I remove the Cyclops and replace it with a single Chimera head and run the same gcode the problem goes away. I figured that it was due to the high back pressure of Cyclops but I've got genuine Bondtech BMGs and I've tried printing as slow as 10mm/sec at temperatures as high as 220C with no luck. There are other problems with the hotend like the inactive side will eventually jam if it isn't used enough. Like if you do a long single color print the inactive side will probably be jammed by the end. I think because you have to keep the filament loaded and the heat slowly transfers through the filament causing swelling. Jams caused by this can be a real pain to clear out. Often you have to take off the cyclops and blast a heatgun into the heatbreak then push the filament through with a small allen wrench. This is solved on a Diamond hotend by printing at a ratio like 95/5 but with this hotend any kind of mixing is detrimental to the print quality. This also means that retracting both filaments with firmware retraction (like you do with a Diamond) will eventually grind through the filament (even with my Bondtech BMGs). Being limited to retracting only one filament at a time makes it very difficult to dial in the retraction, eliminating stringing entirely is almost impossible. Part cooling is also something I never got working well. I suspect it's related to how long the path between the heat break and the nozzle is. I only have PLA and maybe another material would solve some of these issues but nothing on E3D's site say that PLA is problematic, only states that ABS has smoother color transitions.
If I were to do it again, I'd probably buy one of those cheap BTT 2 in 1 mix hotends even though the nozzle isn't replaceable. Even the Y splitter I used with my v5 clone worked more reliably than my Chimera+/Cyclops+.
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@jens55 I had the same experience with my Chimera.
