Will This Palette Work?

I bought, along with a 3D printing friend of mine, an accompaniment piece of hardware to go along with a 3D printer that would help create prints in multiple colors of filament.   It was more on the edge of the technology for 3D printing because of the heavy-duty work it had to do to pull different colors of filament in, splice them together, send the resulting single strand of filament to the printer and do so all in a completely orchestrated way so that the right colors got to the printer at the right time. 

In short, it was a highly complex job that was fraught with points of failure.   I had a lot of frustrations with the Mosaic Palette.   It was, however, such an exciting thing when it worked.   It was almost worth all the failures and hardware issues when you had something that worked.  

My machine had to be sent back to the manufacturer for extensive maintenance because it just couldn't seem to work much of the time.   My friend had somewhat better results, but not by much.   

As of last week the latest version of the Palette is out and it has been long-awaited and shipped with much anticipation by the 3D Printing community.   I ordered early when they first announced and I received mine last week.   I've done two live streams on it and have so far had very good results.  

Have there been failures?  Yes, but not on the Palette's side, on the printer side.   Although I've since discovered some of that was due to settings I should have caught on the Palette side.   Today I completed a seven-hour print of something quite small.   The amount of filament wasn't the thing that took so long, it was the swapping of filament and printing in a precise order.  Tonight, I'm printing another eleven-hour print.  

I'm excited and hopeful that this Palette will be the answer to a lot of issues the last Palette had.   I've discovered some, "features" that need to be addressed, but they're easily circumvented.   I'm already planning a tips and tricks video for the near future if I can get a few additional things worked out.  

Above all else, it's fun to see things that have always printed in one color, one filament, suddenly show up with all sorts of colors on the build surface. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter did her fun run today and was so happy she and he classmates raised money for their school.   Thank you to everyone who helped.   If we missed you, my apologies.  My daughter was calling people and forgot to tell us who she spoke to so we could send the link.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is playing a MMORPG (adventure game online with loads of other real people) with his father.   They've been playing for several hours and both seem to be having a great time.