49:00
Recently, I upgraded my home 3D print lab. It's got a Prussa Core 1 as a workhorse and then a few bamboo machines to handle multiolor prints. And I know, I know they hadn't gone full evil when we got them. And my kids are loving the setup. They've learned a ton. All three of them are doing basic 3D modeling now. And they print a bunch of stuff both for personal use and for me around the house and for their friends and teachers. But there's one thing that is driving me nuts. The waste. Because all of our printers use just one nozzle each. We have to purge a whole bunch of filament from the system every time there's a material change in order to limit crosscontamination. And with multiolor
prints, this can result in a bigger pile of waste than the actual filament that goes into the model itself. And all of this is after tuning. Now, if I had a room full of Prussa XL's, each with five independent extruders, I wouldn't have this problem. And I could also do multimaterial prints more easily for cleaner support removal. I could even do crazy stuff like mixing my own filament colors on the fly out of base colors, like making my own pink out of red and white. The only problem is those are really expensive, not to mention massive. And I love my kids, just not that much. But maybe I could love them this much. This is the Prussa Index. It can do more or less everything that a Prussa XL can do out of the box,
except at half the price. Oh, and did I mention that it tops out at eight print heads rather than five? I mean, look at this. And basically no waste, just like I never waste an opportunity to tell you about our sponsor, Rain. Getting inside my stylish yet always adventure ready shoes. I don't think so. Not with Vezy. No. The Index's big party trick is that instead of switching between full active tool heads like the Prussa XL does, it only switches the tools themselves, the nozzles. This is a little bit slower than the XL, which can keep its independent extruders hot while they're parked. But thanks to the Index's inductive hotend, it can heat these up wicked fast. And by getting rid of all
of that redundant extruder hardware, you ditch a bunch of points of failure, save a bunch of money, and you massively cut down on the footprint. To be clear, the extruder is still in there. It's just that instead of all being one integrated unit, it just pulls up to this array of parked nozzles that are preloaded with all the filaments you're going to need for your print, picks whichever one it wants, and then they somehow get attached to the extruder, and it grabs onto the filament. How does that work? It's really clever. With a normal 3D printer, your cold filament goes into the extruder, which grips and pushes it down into the hot side, which includes your heat block and your nozzle. It's
all self-contained. The Index takes that paradigm and rips it apart. We get one extruder with your usual gears. So far, so good. We've got our nozzles right here where the melty plastic comes out. But here's where your mind is going to get blown. By switching to induction heating, the magnetic coils that heat the nozzles can live in the extruder assembly without risking any damage or premature emluation. Okay, but at this point you've got to be wondering how does the extruder grab onto the filament? Okay, this is pretty clever. When a command tells the index to push, its levers are engaged and then when it retracts the filament, they pull away and leave the nozzle free to just jump out with all of its material still
attached to it. Bontech calls it a wireless hotend. Oh, Bond, we haven't mentioned them yet. Well, we should see the Prussa Index isn't so much a product as it is two products that have been mashed together. the Prussa Core 1 3D printer and the Index Tool Changer from Bond, who plans to make these available standalone at some point in the future. Enough about the hardware for now. Let's look at some really interesting use cases for this tech. The most obvious one has got to be supports. While you can print supports out of the same material as your part, this approach comes with some pretty annoying compromises. the print needs to sort of float over the support structure. So, there's a weak joint that
you can just kind of break away later. But what that means is a small portion of the part that you want is going to droop down a little and then ultimately be worse quality than in other places. With multiple nozzles, you can just mix entirely different materials that don't bond together, like PLA and PETG, because they don't stick. You don't need a gap between your part and the support. And you can print complex models with much better quality. And then they just sort of lift off the support when you're done most of the time. And that's just one aesthetic benefit. There's much cooler stuff like soluble materials. When submerged, these materials will just melt away, leaving you with a final
part that can have hardto-reach complex geometries like this. This has been a major selling point for professional 3D printers for ages because it both enables the production of parts that would otherwise be impractical or even impossible and even just for standard prints. It's just so darn convenient. Now, Bamboo does have a solution for this, pun intended, that's AMS compatible, but bamboo, right? Oh, here's another one. How about combining materials into a single functional part? Take this clip for instance. It has a hard plastic body and then a soft TPU hinge to help make it flexible. Well, TPU doesn't bond to PLA, but by interlocking them during printing, you can create something that's more functional and longerlasting versus if
you tried to make just a PLA spring. You could even make a soft grip texture for something like a screwdriver handle. Though, I prefer the originals from ltstore.com. There are actually economical reasons to use multiple filament types, too. Whether they bond or not, sometimes you might be working with exotic or expensive materials, and you can save a lot of money by only using those materials where they're actually needed. Oh, and another cool one, printing conductive traces. Yeah, there's conductive filaments, though we haven't tried those yet, and we're not sure how well they work. Uh, the coolest thing, though, is that this is all just the tip of the iceberg. The Next Layer made a great video recently highlighting a whole
bunch of really specific applications. So, we'll have a link to that down below. As cool as the functional stuff is though, don't sell multiolor 3D printing short. There's a lot of really cool stuff happening to make color printing better. Like, did you know you can mix colored filaments? Almost like mixing paints to create entirely new colors. They did know that. I said it in the intro. But that does not make it any less cool. That is so freaking cool, right? Prussa just adopted the full spectrum orca slicer project and released color mix. It creates prints with layers of alternating color that at a normal distance create the illusion of an entirely new color. It's just like
the old concept of halftoning in regular old 2D printing where little dots of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black can make up a pretty generous color gamut. Prussa is planning to release a CMYK filament bundle for mixing colors. And with eight tools, you could have, say, CMK RGBW, giving you a pretty generous range of colors to pick. Though, for now, you're limited to three color blends in Prussa's software, and that might be all we get. I think the coolest part of this is that whichever two or three colors you pick, they don't need to be specific colors to use color mix.
You can just take whatever you've got, put it into the Prussa slicer, and then it'll just crap out a list of possible combinations with representative colors. Like, I can't even imagine how you could do something like this with an AMS. Or I guess I could imagine how you could, but it would involve so much filament changing that you'd create more waste than 3D prints. Meanwhile, the only waste from the index is these tiny little priming dods. Freaking awesome. And color mix is just what's happening lately. This software called Hueforge has been really popular for a long while now for making 2Dish art from 3D
printers using a method that creators call filament painting. That system uses filaments with a known opacity to calculate light transmission through the layers and then create new colors by overlapping them. It's not the most user-friendly process unless you buy filament from someone who provides their filaments light transmission as part of the spec. You'll need a device to measure it and etc. But hey, more filament being available on more affordable devices like the Index is going to make all of that a lot easier and have a lot less waste. But wait, there's more. What if I didn't want different filaments? What if I wanted the same filament but with different levels of detail? Well, with different
nozzle sizes, each loaded with the same filament, I could make, I don't know, a Warhammer miniature where the base and the infill could be done at ultra speed with a big fat nozzle. And then the fine details could be done on a thinner nozzle, so I could optimize my print time and my print quality. But wait, there's even more. Every nozzle is a tool, but not every tool is a nozzle. Bond released CAD files for their mounting system and people like the connect creator have already mentioned how say a pen plotter tool would be super easy to make. So imagine then if you will a world where you could have a heat set inserter that puts all of
your threaded crap in place while you are doing your print. And that would make a ton of sense in this configuration too. To be clear, that doesn't exist yet, but it's all been left open to the community thanks to Bontech and Prussa's admirable open- source attitude compared to Bamboo. With all of that said, I'm sure you can understand why the index is such an exciting release. Like, this kind of functionality, at least this kind of functionality without a metric ton of waste, was only really possible on much more expensive hardware. And while $2,300 is still a lot of money, what it also is right around that threshold that pushed early Ultimaker printers into the enthusiast space, which gave
them the momentum to push 3D printing as a whole into the mainstream. So, I think it is both realistic to say that Prussa is going to sell a butt ton of these to businesses and print farms and to individual enthusiasts and also that this is going to contribute to making 3D printing more accessible for everyone. And it gets even better. If you happen to already have a Core 1 3D printer, you don't need to buy the whole thing over again. All you need is the Index upgrade kit, which costs a lot less. It's also more work to assemble than we anticipated. We've got the Founders Edition, hoping that when they ship the Prussa edition shortly, it's going to be a little bit easier. But
even then, it's going to be a fair bit of work. So, I'm sure once Prussa makes a preassembled bundle available, that's going to be a very popular option. For now, though, we're honestly really glad we put in the work. There's still a bit of calibration and tuning to be done. Obviously, if you kind of look at the print quality, but the fact that we can do this at all with minimal waste, I think the result kind of speaks for itself. Just like I speak for our sponsor, Vessie scientists have accelerated research and achieved great progress in a field of study directed at the protection of one of the human body's most crucial organs, the human foot.
SHOE SCIENCE. Their crowning achievement, the storm burst. An extraordinarily versatile piece of footwear with all-terrain capability and strikingly effective water repellent qualities. This ability was made possible due to Vessie's patented Datex technology engineered with four soft and flexible What does that do? Is it We're trying to Does it laser zap it or does it lasers? No. No, it doesn't. The high traction coefficient of the rugged outsole is remarkably combined with the shock absorption of a dual density midsole, producing footwear that is both
extremely durable and supremely comfortable to wear while remaining both breathable and lightweight. I heard they come with a one-year warranty and 30-day returns and free shipping and 15% off your first order if you use our code If you like this video, why not check out when we used the E3D tool changer to print a PC case? Uh tool changers have come a long way since
