After office hours are over and we’ve packed up and retreated to our lairs, we still think about 3D printing. Often enough, you’ll find us trawling through websites and forums, and checking out what various communities have been up to on Reddit.
During one such adventure we came across Sakati’s brilliant Creality Ender 3 print colorizer, a nifty device that utilizes Sharpie (or other) permanent marker pens to color prints as you print.
How it works isn’t too complicated either. On top of the Ender 3 (a very affordable machine) sits a pen rack with a few colored pens of your choice. On the print head is a special pen holding extension, which will go and fetch and return pens from the pen rack. Between this some 3D printing happens quite as you’d expect, with filament and a nozzle, you know, like normal. Printing and penning alternate to deliver a colorful final print. The results are pretty nifty.
All of this works thanks to a Cura plugin which is used to add the G-code for the pens, and some calibration, of course. The brains behind the project, Sakati84, has included a full guide to the
Ender 3 colorizer, including materials, STLs and installation over on its Github repo. There are also a few images of colorful printed critters achieved with the setup.
It might be clever, and it might be cool, but it also means prints take around double the length of time they would normally. On the plus side, all the coloring is done for you, so if you have the coloring skills of a jittery toddler, this will probably be a better path to go down.
The entire project is open source, so you can give it a go and improve on the results for yourself. Or, if you fancy a different flavor of project, hit the links below.
License: The text of "This Creality Ender 3 Print Colorizer Is Genius" by All3DP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.