So, it turns out that printing a 2-color part with my hyrel is proving to be a little more difficult than I had first thought. Unfortunately, adding more primes didn’t seem to help get the filament flowing well enough to create full holes for the dice. However, thanks to help from a friend who also owns a Hyrel, he helped me figure out a really neat hack that will start the flow of filament going nicely!
When you change tools, print a line of filament at the back of the bed to get the flow going again! That seemed like a really neat idea, so I set out trying to custom code that. To start with, I inserted the following instructions:
G0 X200 Y0
G1 X100 E.1
Let’s dissect those GCODE lines, just so you guys can see what they mean (if you aren’t already familiar with GCODE). G0 signifies a rapid linear move (seemingly used for travel moves, although don’t quote me on that!!). X200 Y0 tells the extruder to move to the coordinate (200,0) on the bed so that it can start printing. G1 X100 tells it to move from x=200 to x=100, while E.1 says to extrude 1mm of material as it moves from x=200 to x=100.
So I inserted those instructions and watched what happened! Turns out they need a little tweaking…. starting at x=200 was causing the printer to hit a limit and try to go a little further, skewing the bed and causing the print to fail. Therefore, instead of going from x=200 to x=100, I went from x=150 to x=50. Hopefully that won’t trigger the endstop, but I will try it out and adapt as necessary!
Also, the filament barely started coming out with 1mm of filament extruded, so I might change E.1 to E.2 to really make sure the filament is primed for printing.
The last problem is that these instructions are executed with the wrong extruder! it starts by printing the line with the left extruder, and then later on, with the right; I need it to be the other way around, starting with the right extruder.
Hopefully the next post will be a completed dice, but we’ll see! Stay tuned
John (aka The Mad Printer)
The Mad Printer 