Comment on Blending filaments?

• ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  No, I’m talking about this

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  • ShutUpWesley@piefed.zip ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That was an awesome read, but it does seem to be an evolution of the dithering in FullSpectrum.

    What I’m talking about is a print-head that would combine multiple melted filaments into blending hotend, so the extruded plastic would be a blend

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    • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      That would be impossible to control. paper CMYK printers don’t even do it like that.

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      • ShutUpWesley@piefed.zip ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        You may be right, but I may attempt of to build some POCs to explore the concept, because I think the challenges are manageable

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    • Crozekiel@lemmy.zip ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Filament won’t mix in the nozzle, it is laminar flow. That’s why the multi-color filaments still print multi-color instead of becoming a mix.

      Also, as someone else pointed out, color printers do not mix ink, they put tiny dots on the page - like pixels on a monitor. In fact, basically everything you look at today with color is using tiny dots of color and dithering to make it look like a different color. So, it sounds more like your problem here is that FDM printing does not have the resolution needed to make the dithering effect indistinguishable at the distance you would like. Which may be fair, but it is more likely that someone invent a way to significantly increase the resolution of FDM prints than it is that they would find a way to mix any color you want from CMYK filament “on the fly”.

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      • ShutUpWesley@piefed.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Im away that ink printers don’t mix ink, but it’s the resolution issue with FDM that makes me think filament blending is the way to go

        I’ve been contemplating how to blend the liquid (or near liquid) filament without introducing chaotic flow, which fortunately I have some experience with from previous projects, and in effect I believe that the filament stream could be twisted, it wouldn’t bleed strictly laminar but can be done in a way that can avoid turbidity. It wouldn’t be perfectly “blended”, but with some uneducated guesses I estimate it could get the color resolution down to about 0.08mm.

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