Since day one, Mosaic has been fully committed to making multi-color and multi-material 3D printing as accessible as possible. Our goal has always been to advance the 3D printing industry from creating single-color plastic parts to creating vibrant, valuable multi-color and multi-material prints.
Just over three years ago, we launched our Kickstarter campaign for Palette, the first product to bring quality multi-color 3D printing to the market. In July 2017, we introduced Palette+, bringing multi-material 3D printing to the desktop market for the first time.
Now, we’re incredibly excited to announce the launch of our ecosystem of next generation multi-material 3D printing products. This ecosystem includes:
CANVAS Hub
The way these new products interact with each other is crucial to giving you the best possible experience. This is why it was important that we launch an ecosystem—rather than a single or multiple individual products.
Over the past three years, we’ve received a significant amount of feedback on what you want to see from our products, and this feedback has mainly revolved around a few themes:
- Improve the state of multi-material 3D printing software and streamline the multi-material printing workflow
- Improve the reliability of multi-material hardware
- Decrease the technical knowledge and time required for setup (hardware and software)
- Improve the user experience of printing in multiple materials (hardware and software)
- Expand the range of material combinations that can be printed together reliably
- Launch hardware at a more accessible price point
The issues above could not be addressed with a single product, as the pain points spanned across hardware, software, and firmware. The way our new product ecosystem supports and feeds into itself allows you to have a simple and enjoyable experience when it comes to multi-material 3D printing on your 3D printer.
CANVAS 3D Printing Platform
100% of our customers print with multiple materials and each one of them has experienced shortcomings with the current state of multi-material software workflows. Software like Cura, Simplify3D, and Slic3r were not designed with multi-material printing as a core focus; their multi-material workflows were mostly afterthoughts.
As a result, users are forced through a tedious process including creating multiple processes, matching models to different processes, manually piecing models together, and managing four times the number of settings for a four-material print.
CANVAS is the opposite. Right from the start, we’ve designed its infrastructure and workflow to fully support multi-material printing. Features like dragging and dropping colors and materials onto different .STLs, automatically aligning model origins, and managing backend printing processes seamlessly, mean that your software workflow will be pleasant—not painful.
We also have some incredibly exciting features in the pipeline for CANVAS. These features will help you improve your print quality without deep technical knowledge, color .STL models, and more. We’re also working to significantly decrease transition material for multi-filament parts and—now that we CANVAS’s slicing engine allows us to generate print files (rather than relying on print files from other slicers)—this goal is within reach.
On top of all this, CANVAS is in the cloud, so you can slice from any device without worrying about software updates or managing libraries of hundreds of .stl files on your computer; CANVAS takes care of all that for you.
In short, CANVAS was built for multi-material printing, but still has numerous benefits for single-material printing. It was built to give you the best print quality possible—whether you’re printing in one material or four.
To Palette/Palette 2 users and non-users alike: we’d love it if you could give CANVAS a try. You can sign up and log in here: CANVAS, or read the full CANVAS Introductory Post Here.
To help you get started, we’ve built a tool to automatically generate a printing profile for you. Just load your profile from your current slicer and in one click you’ll be ready to slice for your printer with CANVAS. CANVAS currently accepts slicer profiles from Simplify3D and Slic3r, with support for settings from KISSlicer and Cura planned in the near future.
We’d appreciate any feedback or thoughts you have on the platform, including what features you would like to see and any bugs you come across.
Palette 2 & Palette 2 Pro
Our Palette line of products sits next to your existing 3D printer and takes in multiple filaments. It then combines these filaments into a single strand and feeds this combined filament into your 3D printer.
Palettes understand the order the different filaments need to be in, and calculate precisely how much of each filament is required for your multi-color or multi-material print.
Creating and manufacturing a brand new technology is not an easy thing to do, so Palette and Palette+ were built with functionality as the core focus. With Palette 2, we expanded this focus to include reliability, ease of use, and feature-richness. Thanks to plenty of feedback from our community, we’ve learned from and addressed the shortcomings of Palette/Palette+ to create an even better product.
Palette 2 automatically calibrates for your 3D printer, comes with a color touch screen, costs $200 less than Palette+ ($300 less during pre-orders!), and no longer requires any external sensors or additions to your 3D printer.
While these changes addressed the majority of user feedback regarding Palette+, one challenge remained: reliability for long, challenging prints.
That’s where the CANVAS Hub comes in.
CANVAS Hub
Palette v1.0 and Palette+ function as accessories, which allows them to operate with a broad range of 3D printers, and reduces technical knowledge required of users.
However, a challenge with this approach (where the printer and Palette(+) did not communicate digitally) is that it was challenging for Palette(+) to monitor the printer’s progress. To address this, we implemented a system of measuring and checking in with the printer via our filament sensor, the Scroll Wheel. However, this system was not perfect—it required user tuning and experimentation to get the settings to work effectively.
That’s one of the reasons why we’re introducing CANVAS Hub.
CANVAS Hub sits between your Palette 2 and your 3D printer, and acts as a way for the two to communicate. This communication means that Palette 2 knows exactly how much filament your printer is consuming and is able to stay perfectly in sync.
CANVAS Hub also allows you to communicate with CANVAS over WiFi and control your entire printing experience wirelessly, including controlling your printer and your Palette 2, and starting prints.
CANVAS Hub plugs into the vast majority of printers via a USB plug-in and requires no modifications to your machine. (Learn if your printer is compatible with CANVAS Hub at the Compatibility page.)
Mosaic’s Multi-Material Ecosystem
By focusing on more than one product, we’re able to provide a user experience that surpasses every available option to date. From simplified slicing to reliable multi-material printing, the Mosaic ecosystem will allow you to derive the most value from your 3D printer.
We invite you to join the community and help us further advance 3D printing. You can sign up for CANVAS here (it’s free!), and you can pre-order a Palette 2/Palette 2 Pro and a CANVAS Hub on this page!
If you’d like to read more about each of these products, check out the posts below:
Introducing: Palette 2 & Palette 2 Pro
Introducing: CANVAS 3D Printing Platform (Slicer live now!)
- Your friends at Mosaic