My multi-color/-material printers

[spegelius]

My other printer that I modified for multi-material printing is a Tronxy X5S-2E that I bought mostly because I wanted a corexy-machine and a printer project to build on. Didn't want a fully working machine, more like a base to build on. Still the printer printed suprisingly well without any mods, but there were some real problems:
- the X5S-2E model has a E3D Cyclops clone which is a 2-in 1-out mixing hotend. The hotend kinda works, but out of the box it leaked from multiple places and didn't feed too well with PLA, I had to beef up the default extruders with planetary gearboxes. I managed to block the leaks mostly, but switched to E3D V6 in the end, but I did some mixing prints. Might revisit the hotend some day...
- the belts weren't aligned which caused the print dimensions to get skewed going to the edges. That's a known problem with the earlier versions of the X5S and there are custom parts available to fix that.
- Z-axis implemented with two separate stepper motors that can move independently when not powered, what could go wrong... had to do manual adjustment quite a lot, until I designed a single Z-motor mod: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3612257 based on other similar mods
- some other minor issues that I've fixed along the way. I have replaced quite a lot of the original parts with mod parts and now the printer prints quite nicely.
- replaced the original board with Duet Maestro and 7" PanelDue
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Currently the printer has 6 extruders (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3813628) beefed up with belted reduction (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3091980). The extruders use Bondtech gears (ahem Aliexpress Bondtech gears). They do seem to work ok, although the gears might be bit better quality if they were original Bondtech gears (more on these later). They are a lot cheaper though so there's that.

Wiring needs to be taken care of. I need to redo the wiring from Duet to the relay, currently there's a resistor hack to get the Duet signal levels to work with the relay. I need to replace that with a decoder chip. Also general wire cleanup has been due for a while.

The extruders are mounted on a extra frame I did using Dollo3D extrusion parts. The reason for this is that it reduces the bowden length a bit and mounting all those extruders to the frame might have been cumbersome.

The relay board I'm using with this printer is a Sainsmart 16-port relay. With that I could control 9-extruders and taking the Maestro's second extruder driver, total of 10 extruders.

The feeder part for 6 filaments works, but it is a bit bulky and I don't like how it bends the PTFE-tube going to the hotend. Might change that at some point.

More pictures here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Ay...uEHLzl5vQdy5H_