Introducing: Myself, the Maestro, and the Crane

[streamliner]

Hey Guys,

My name is David Hargrove; i'm a contributor to the Klipper Firmware project, long time open source developer in the 3d printing community,and currently the Product Lead for the PrintM3D Crane Line of printers. The Crane comes in three flavors: a bowden version, a dual mixing head, and a quad mixing(CMYK(ey) based head. All of these are based on the Duet 2 Maestro, an Open Hardware project jointly designed and delivered by M3D and Duet3d. I'm also the Lead Systems Engineer for PrintM3D.

I reached out to Jonathan recently about KissSlicer, as I've been a fan for some time. He was happy enough to provide me with a key to use for development purposes and I must say I am totally blown away by KissSlicer Premium Alpha 2; so much that I've already purchased a personal license and prepare to do so for the company this week. I emailed Jonathan earlier, and again accused him of being a time-traveler... he seems to be hitting the exact targets we anticipated without any communication between our two parties... the only plausible reason is that he simply traveled to the future, determined the best tech, and brought it back...

But, truly, I would love to know if we have any others that have or plan to purchase a Crane or ProMega printer(both are Duet 2 Maestro based). Also, and really more to the point of what I am after: is there anyone out there that is planning to purchase a Maestro and head separately for upgrading another printer? If you fall into these categories, I'd love to have open discussion with you here.. especially if you are interested in the mixing heads. I'd also love to hear if you've attempted mixing with the Diamond hotend or any other multi-in, single-out mixing extruders.

While we have various color mixing methods in place for Cura, Slic3r, and even some of our community's homebrewed slicers, we still haven't quite honed in out what we think fits best as far as color-mix based slicing. I even tried using Monolith today and just became confused to the point of needing to take a break for an hour. =P Anyways, I want you all to know: none of this is an advertisement, none of it is trying to convince you to buy a printer or anything of the sort; my guiding principle is transparency.

If you have any color mixing experience you'd like to bring to the table, please note this entire project from our side of development will be consistently available on Github... I am in fact in the process of rebasing some of our repos now in preparation for our first consumers purchasing the Crane.

Thanks and I hope we'll all be able to work on some cool stuff together!

Thanks,

David Hargrove

[pjr]

Hi David

Thanks for posting the information; I just had a quick look at the web site (quad printer) and watched the "racing frogs" video.

There were 3 things that I found a little disappointing:

1. No attribution; Roman Tyr's (cipis) remixes are extremely good (he also remixed the clown fish).
2. Racing frogs are usually printed without supports; including them does not really do the printer justice.
3. That wipe/waste tower is rather archaic and extraordinarily huge!

I have been interested in colour mixing for some time, but I already own 2 x PR Mk2 + MMU and 1 x PR Mk3 + MMU2 (waiting for KISS to catch up )

If you need any help with development or testing, please let me know; my beta-testing and SNMM experience are quite extensive

Peter

[streamliner]

Hi pjr,

Of course, and to be totally honest I was unaware of the issue with the racing frogs... we did a bit of an experiment lately in handling all of our support via Discord; once again, we're trying to move totally into the realm of open source, and support it.. not EVER take from it and not attribute and return more than we have derived... so this mention of the lack of attribution bothers me quite severely, and we'll take care of it immediately. I joined this project only recently, and have literally changed my life around(with the blessing of my wife and her help as well) to make this a good release from us. This means everything.. from attributing those already operating in the color mixing space, to assisting those in realizing their ideas in the future..

2. Def noted; one thing I will note here: many of our original prints were ensured to be perfect by things like regex scripts; this is because the Duet Firmware was in a state of Flux, you'll note the changes in the M569 mixing command... it was necessary for us to post-process all gcode, and it's possible the supports were added for a reason that I am not even aware of. I'll certainly keep this in mind.

3. It certainly is, and since that tower print we've made tremendous strides in our mixing capability, our available workflows, purging methods, and so much more.

Would you join me sometime on discord? You can add me as a friend with the ID: davidh#0001 -- I'd love to chat with you.

[pjr]

Hi David

Thanks for your response. Never used discord, but willing to try anything

Peter

[pjr]

Would you join me sometime on discord? You can add me as a friend with the ID: davidh#0001 -- I'd love to chat with you.

Still waiting. I put in a "friend request" a couple of weeks ago and that is still "pending".

Peter

[pjr]

...so this mention of the lack of attribution bothers me quite severely, and we'll take care of it immediately...

David

I would like to point out that it has been almost 3 weeks since your statement, and attribution has not yet been made.

I believe that you may also be in contravention of the non-commercial aspect of the license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Peter