Edit: included homing switch information in section, "Updated Filament Sensors" .
Since we launched Palette 2 and Palette 2 Pro in August of 2018, we’ve received an incredible amount of feedback and input from our user base on how we could make your experience even better.
This feedback was the driving force behind our June release of CANVAS Paint, and our release today of Palette 2S, Palette 2S Pro, and the CANVAS Hub S. This post will dig a bit deeper into the changes we made, why we focused on those areas, and what you should expect in the months to come.
And for all those Palette 2 and 2 Pro owners out there - we put together an upgrade module to allow you to upgrade your product to the latest and greatest. You can learn more about these modules here.
Updated internals of the P2S Pro featuring the Splice Core S Pro
With Palette 2S and 2S Pro, we’ve focused on reliability, ease of use, and overall user experience. We’ve gone through the core systems of Palette 2/2 Pro, optimized them, and endurance tested in order to ensure we’re able to keep raising the bar when it comes to multi-material 3D printing.
Check out some of the biggest changes below:
Increased Splicing Speed
There’s a number of things that affect the maximum speed you can print at - your layer height, your model, as well as Palette’s splicing speed. When printing with larger layer heights (such as .3), or very small pieces, you may need to decrease your print speed to ensure Palette 2 could keep up.
We’ve been hard at work to solve this problem, and are really excited to announce the new Palette 2S and 2S Pro splice cores! We know that you never want to slow your print speeds down when printing with Palette, and the latest iteration of splice cores will allow you to have more flexibility to keep your print settings.
Both of these Cores allow your Palette 2S and 2S Pro to splice 10% faster than their predecessors.
Internal shot of the new Palette 2S
This will give you the leg up when printing with higher speeds, and save print hours on all your future parts!
Pre-Uploaded Firmware
When we first shipped Palette 2 in late 2018, we were under very tight timelines. Managing the process of manufacturing, shipping and fulfillment to our customers across the globe wasn’t an easy challenge. In order to hit our deadlines, we did have to make a compromise - we asked users to upload firmware to their product upon receiving it.
This caused an additional step that you would have to do when you would receive your product, and to be honest, resulted in an experience that was suboptimal. With Palette 2, we’ve had another year of development time under our belts, and are really glad that users will no longer have to go through this process.
Being able to take your Palette 2S/2S Pro out of the box, and immediately begin printing will give you the seamless experience we know you want.
Optimized Drive Arms
When originally designing Palette 2, one of the things that was incredibly important to us was that the user be able to easily view and access the filament path. Occasionally, more brittle filaments can break in this path, and being able to view and remove this filament quickly was a huge part of a good user experience.
With Palette 2, the only portions of the filament path you can’t see directly are the sections in the splice core, as well as the drive arms.
In addition to this, the arms have been modified in order to more reliably drive material. The most noticeable change comes with softer materials like TPU or PVA. With Palette 2S and 2S Pro, the drive arms now more consistently control the material path, giving you more accurate and dependable control even at higher speeds.
Updated Filament & Homing Sensors
Design & visual appearance is an incredibly important aspects of our product line, and while we were making changes to the functional aspects of Palette 2/2 Pro we wanted to give it a bit of an aesthetic update as well.
With this in mind, we made a small change to update the internal face of your Palette 2, upgrading all of the LED’s on the filament sensors to white.
Additionally, we made a modification to the placement of the homing switch on the board, helping prolong the life of the sensor.
This gives a fresh and new look to the inside of your product, especially important since we’ve been told many of our customers run their Palette 2 and 2 Pro’s with the lids off.
CANVAS
We wouldn’t be doing the evolution of Palette fair justice without talking about the significant evolution that CANVAS has gone through. When Palette 2 shipped out last year, CANVAS went live as an early beta slicer.
Now, it's a project management tool, content creation tool, and cloud slicer. It's gone through a significant transformation, and allows you to create, store, and print content in a way no other platform can. Below is a quick overview of a few of the largest changes:
CANVAS Paint
CANVAS Paint is our content creation tool which allows everyone to create multi-color content from single color .stl files. This tool enables you to get the most of Palette, through the power of content customization.
Project Management and Sharing:
One of the big benefits of being in the cloud is the ability to share projects across users. Through the power of Project Link Sharing, you can share your projects with the Palette community, or your own network.
Cloud Slicing:Since CANVAS Beta launched in 2018, we’ve increased the slicing speed of CANVAS by 3x. We’ve also worked out the bugs which caused slower slicing speeds, and slicing errors back during the beta stage. If the cloud is not for you, we also continue to support other desktop based slicers with our free post-processor tool, Chroma.
Grab your latest generation Palette 2 on our website here!