If you weren’t following AnkerMake’s wildly successful Kickstarter campaign closely, you’d be forgiven for missing a pretty significant announcement this week. Tucked away on the ‘Updates’ page for backers, Anker dropped the most mega of accessory upgrades for the AnkerMake M5 – a multicolor, multi-material filament cabinet that enables six-color prints.
Madness.
That’s one color more than Prusa Research’s temperamental MMU2 but two less than the pricey third-generation Mosaic Palette 3.
Backers of the AnkerMake M5 get first dibs on the V6 Color Engine, with the device now available as a pledge “Add-on” at a discount over the expected retail price.
AnkerMake claims the V6 Color Engine was developed in response to feedback on the just-weeks-old campaign, which seems pretty hard to believe for such a developed idea and concept. Regardless, the device is, naturally, still under development and expected to drop sometime early in 2023.
How Does it Work?
From appearances alone, the six-spool-toting V6 resembles Ultimaker’s Material Station. The banks of spools feed filament into a minimalist front plate with basic load/unload controls. It looks like the filament loading will be similar to Ultimaker’s system, too, withdrawing and feeding filament as needed rather than the splicing you see on systems like Mosaic Manufacturing’s Palette.
AnkerMake claims its system is smart enough to calculate the exact lengths of filament required to make it a purgeless process, eliminating material waste. A separate print head specifically for use with the V6 is provided.
Digging through the campaign’s comments, Anker clarifies a little more about the no-purge process. The system partially wipes into infill to accommodate what is claimed will be “a small amount of transition material” between color changes.
As an alternative to multicolor or multi-material printing, you could load up six spools of the same filament and let the system automatically reload once a spool is used up. This convenience alone could be worth the cost for power users that print a lot.
An animation on the update page shows a multicolor print setup similar to that in Cura or PrusaSlicer. You’ll need individual STLs for each color component and assign a filament to each model. We’ll note this is a rare glimpse at the AnkerMake Slicer, which looks to be a clean new environment, far removed from a basic Cura reskin, something we see all too often.
What Else?
The V6 Color Engine will double as a filament dryer and humidity cabinet, preventing degradation of hygroscopic filament in addition to feeding the AnkerMake M5. Being part of a “smart” ecosystem of devices, the V6 will, AnkerMaker claims, integrate seamlessly to show filament levels, progress, and temperature on the printer’s display and via the printer’s companion app.
This last point is particularly noteworthy, given that some degree of awareness of a spool’s contents is necessary for the machine to know how much is left. It’s not a new concept and is something other manufacturers have handled with NFC tags or similar hardware. On budget 3D printers, such a move has historically been viewed negatively – stifling user choice to manufacturer’s own filaments being antithetical to the “open-source” origins that many view as inextricable from desktop 3D printing.
But AnkerMake seems to be on top of this. Replies to backer comments about the V6 appear to indicate that, in addition to selling its own chipped spools, the company will also provide an NFC tag write function. This means the user could attribute information about a spool of material, stick the tag to said spool, and the system recognizes it for usage logging during prints. Smart stuff.
Backers can pledge an additional $299 to bundle the V6 Color Engine with their M5, a 40% reduction on AnkerMake’s claimed $499 MSRP.
License: The text of "AnkerMake Reveals V6 Color Engine Multicolor Printing Add-on" by All3DP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.