Hello everyone, first post here, not the first time around the forum.
The new AMS (Automatic Material System) things have catch my attention and since I’m not the type of guy that likes just to spend the money if I can do it myself, here I am showing how I was able to print multi color prints (not just changing by layers, full multicolor) on a stock Ender-3 with the help of some extra parts and a Rapberry pi with Octoprint on it (but this last part is optional and there are workarounds).
I have inspired myself on similar projects, like 3dChamaleon (https://www.3dchameleon.com/)
Few images first:
The concept:
Having multiple (2 in this proof of concept) motors to feed different colours to the hot tip and using some g-code and 4 relays to “connect” or “disconnect” the motor we want to use to feed the correct color.
Summary of how I did it:
I use custom g-code to retract all the way out the currently used filament, then octoprint with a plugin and some python code to, using a g-code to activate or deactivate al relays to choose the correct color, then move the filament to the hot tip and continue the printing.
I can be more specific an share code and parts used for this if there is interest here.