The Connex3 also comes with a powerful materials cabinet. It’s a separate unit typically installed beside the main Connex3 and is intended to house cartridges containing color resins. The resins are pumped into the printer during active printing.
Now you’d think there would need to be extra space for cartridges servicing the new third material and you’d be correct. But there is another key feature: each of the four cartridge bays (one for each of the three different materials and one for support material) can hold TWO cartridges.
The system is set to automatically switch to the alternate cartridge if the first one should empty. Then, while it uses the alternate cartridge, you can hot swap in a new cartridge to replace the empty cartridge.
There are two great implications of this:
- You can leave a very long print unattended without need for human intervention to reload material – twice as long, in fact.
- You can theoretically print forever if you keep replacing cartridges. However, we’re told that two cartridges will enable printing of an extremely large object.
Adding “infinite materials” to the wish list of 3D printer features.
