About this 3D model
What is it? -- Its an experiment to see if we can drive a large number of extruders from just two motors and one of the common circuit boards which are only capable of driving at most two motors. In the SCAD files for this thing you specify the X & Y dimensions of your print bed is and the program works out how many extruders can fit in a housing that will fit on your print bed. STL files have been included for N=4, other sizes can be generated using SCAD. Concept -- If you use one motor to select an extruder and the other motor to drive the selected extruder, then you're not limited by number of motors but by how many extruders you can squeeze on to your print bed. Such a mechanism would be way too large to fit on the x-carriage so this is all intended to use bowden tubes to get to the hot-end on the X-carriage. For this to be entirely useful, it will also be necessary to build a conjoined hot-end. (I've found that most of my ABS varieties print at similar temperatures therefore using a shared heating element seems feasible, worst case using two conjoined hot ends at different temperatures if the temperature variations are too wide). Why? -- So... I can print all the things. Cautions / Warnings -- - So far all I've done is a proof-of-concept design and verify that the resulting STL's are slice-able, this will most definitely change once I start printing it.. - This approach seems a bit too obvious to not have been done before, I expect that there must be a catch as to why I can't find an existing design. (Translation: I'm not convinced yet that this will actually work, but I don't see any reason it wouldn't work). - I'm publishing this as a draft because my primary interest is in seeing printers that can handle a variety of materials in a single print, even if this is not successful it might give others ideas. - This thing will stay draft until I've verified it is operational, if anyone else does decide they want to join the experiment, please give me feedback on any flaws you find. - If anyone does want to collaborate on this thing then let me know and I'll throw the code on github. - If you try to render all the parts OpenSCAD will colapse in a heap, use the PrintPlates to get parts for printing..