Mosaic Palette 2 (1.75mm) for Multi-Material 3D Printing on 1.75mm Printers

The palette 2 works, it does work on one assumption however, and this assumption is very important to understand before purchasing this device. The assumption is that your 3d printer will extrude the EXACT amount of filament your slicer requests. This also is equally important for retractions also. For my experience, I had one hell of a time to get the Palette 2 working correctly. My problem was not the accuracy of my extruder. My problem was my retraction settings were way too aggressive. I had my retractions set to 60mm/second for speed. That causes clicking and that should have been my first clue. After I slowed down my retraction to 6mm/s this thing started to work as it should. The printer was not the issue, and the Palette 2 was functioning exactly as it should. However, the issue was just a simple setting. It took two weeks to find the problem. However this is the shortcoming of the Palette 2, it has to assume that your settings are correct, for your printer. If the slicer calls for 100mm of filament your extruder will spool off EXACTLY 100mm of filament, if your slicer calls for 1mm of retraction your extruder will retract EXACTLY 1mm of filament. If you feel comfortable dialing your extruder so it does that with no filament slippage or grinding. Which is not a hard task to do on most printers.With all that said let's compare this technology to other ways of getting multiple colors out of a 3D FDM printer. The first and probably the most pain in you know what is dual extruders. I have one of these it's the Flash Forge dreamer it is a decent printer I have heavily modified it over the years. However to get decent dual color prints you need to have both nozzles perfectly level. This is a real trick to get the nozzles at a perfect level, if one is even a little off that extruder will drag up what the other extruder left down. It's doable but expect to spend at least a day and a bunch of test prints getting it perfected. It is a real pain and that is just the first level you have to get right. The next is the slicer settings, you have purge blocks, ooze shields, temperatures. If you are new to 3d printing this is not easy to set up.The next way is with a mixing extruder, and this has one nozzle but 2 inputs. I have never used one of these extruders. I have never used one of these so I cannot comment on the difficulty or as I like to call it the price of admission.The palette 2 has 4 colors, and if you can get 2 to work then 4 should be just as easy but a bigger purge tower or more plastic in your purge bucket. For more complicated projects you do need to have a very accurate printer because there are other considerations besides just how your colors get changed on your printer. As far as multi-color printing for me the palette 2 is the least of all evils. You don't have to level 2 extruders, and if set up right it is really slick. The splices which are what this thing is really a filament splicer is spot on. Makes some of the best splices I have ever seen. The software chain isn't too bad, I have tried both Chroma and Canvas. I like Chroma, and my slicer better, Canvas is not a bad slicer it is serviceable, it is a bit slow, and requires the internet connection. Chroma works well, it is also a bit slow but I am working with huge files 50mb. Chroma gets the job done, and isn't too hard to use. I use the palette in connected mode, and it works great.Why I didn't give this five stars.1) I am deducting one star because the palette2 has the hardware and capability to warn you when your extruder is not working correctly. The palette has a measuring wheel that it uses to figure out exactly how much filament your extruder is consuming. If they warned you that your extruder is slipping when the ping measurements have a very high delta, or the extruder is grossly off on pings that exceed +-10% of the ideal 100% ping. If they added this to the screen I will re-evaluate my review, and give them one more star.EDIT 6-5-2019 Increasing my rating to 4 stars updated the firmware they have added the feature that stops your print if the pings get to far off....2) I purchased my palette 2 on the 13th of May the next week they reduced the price by 100 bucks. I understand I get it I missed the sale. However, I am knocking 1 star off the review for that. This one is a bit arbitrary, but I so wanted to return the palette 2, and get another one at the discount. However, that is not fair and so I will just ding them a star for this instead.EDIT 6/7/2019 The customer support from Mosaic is AMAZING, they are really good people, and want to help their customers succeed. The Palette 2 gets bumped up to five stars, there after sales support is amazing. They want to have everyone succeed. I can give this a full 5 stars, for a great machine and great customer support.The takeaway should you buy this? That is a simple answer if you feel comfortable with calibrating your extruder so it is reasonably accurate. I can recommend this purchase, it does what it sets out to do, and it does it quite well. If this is your first foray into multi-color printing this is probably going to be the easiest to set up and get working. It is far simpler than two extruders, and four extruders well that is for people that like pain.Update 7/28/2019I have been using Palette 2 for several months now, and I am happy with this product. If you have any interest in multicolor prints then you need to seriously consider the Palette 2.Update 11/26/2019Been running many prints using the Pallette 2, and wow this thing is still going. I haven't even had to change the splice tube yet. I have about 6,000 splices on this device. I am using this with PETG only, and it is still going strong. This is the easiest multicolor printing solution I have experienced. I have other options with my dreamer with two extruders, but that is a pain, trying to keep calibration perfected, and it requires ooze shields, and a transition tower, the tower is not as big but the shield makes up for that in time, and materials. This is the way to go if you are looking for multi-color/multi-material printing solution.1/5/2020I was able to do a multi material print with PLA and PETG, and this shouldn’t be possible but The Pallete 2 did it with some splice tuning and fancy code. Really impressed with the results.

I have been using the palette 2 pro for a few weeks now, so this is just an initial review, I'll update more as I get more experience. The setup I am using with the paletteUpdate: March 1, 2019 (changed to 4 stars)TLDR: made several changes and am now getting successful prints. The software is still very basic and lacking features.Using accessory mode (sd card and no connection to printer) I could not successfully print anything but a few simple two color key chains. Even with two color models success seemed to be dependent on the number of transitions, more transitions would always result in failure.I updated the palette's firmware to 4.0.2 (Jan 15, 2019 update) and then 4.0.3 (Feb 14, 2019 update).I switched from using accessory mode to connected mode using a raspberry pi with octoprint and mosaic's palette plug-in. I did not install the canvas plug-in and have not used canvas. While mosaic does not make this clear (I even emailed support over this) you can use connected mode without canvas.With chroma 3.1 you can set it to use connected mode, and have chrome generate .mcf files instead of the two files (.maf and .maf.gcode) used in accessory mode. You then upload the single .mcf file to octoprint, can select it and tell it to print.The octoprint plug-in is pretty basic, and there is lots of room for improvement but it seems to work better than accessory mode.My extruder calibration has not changed, though I did double check it.I also noticed that the first splice at 170 mm length was always good and the palette got out of sync on later splices. So I updated the base splice length and eventually switched to advanced mode with the shortest length longer than the original default, and make sure to select color strength when setting up prints.With these changes I have now been successfully printing 3 color prints with 50+ splices. I have not moved up to larger prints yet as I have been trying to let the palette gradually calibrate (the palette is suppose to learn from successful prints).I will note that I still have problems with the software generating moves that can ruin prints by moving the hotend across already printed areas of a different color without a z-hop. This can leave streaks on the print that can't be removed.I will update again once I have more info on more complicated, larger prints.Original Review: 3 starTLDR: It works but it is finicky, and the software will fail on some prints. The software seems to be the biggest problem so the experience should improve as Mosaic release updates.Printer: Voron 1.x corexy using a bowden setup and bondtech QR extruderOS: LinuxSlicer: Simplify3D v4.1.1Post processing software: chroma v3.1.1Palette firmware version: 2.1.2Because I am using Simplify3d + chroma the palette is being used in accessory mode (using an sd card to load the .maf files and start prints). I will not be using mosaic's Canvas slicer, so I can not speak to its quality or how it interacts with the palette.Setup:The setup is not hard, but it does require some reading and watching some videos. Mosaic did a live stream (it is now on youtube) showing the setup print and they should redo just this portion of the video as a setup tutorial it was very helpful.My first calibration print succeeded, and it helped me learn how to setup prints. I should note subsequent prints don't require all the steps of the calibration print and it would have been nice if their video covered the difference. But it should only take a print or two to understand the differences even without them being called out.Hardware:So far I am impressed with the hw end of the palette it is very well thought out, and assembled. I have had two issues so far:1. The attachment from the palette to the printer. The palette uses a custom width bowden tube and a clip that attaches to your extruder via velcro. The extruder clip would not fit on my printer so I can not speak to how well it works, instead I downloaded an stl from Mosaic from thingiverse that is the base model of the tube clip and used freecad to join it with the bondtech QR filament guide stl, making a custom attachment that should have worked. It didn't, the tube popped out of the clip everytime I used it. I could have resized it to make it tighter and that might have worked, instead I created custom bowden tube clips one for the extruder end and one for the palette. This works well and I can use regular bowden tube. The only thing I had to do on the palette was set a custom tube length in the firmware settings. I am not sure why Mosaic went with the system they did, as my current setup is better and allows me to easily replace the tube and change the tube length and match it to the printer and location, their custom size tubing with custom ends will be hard to replace.2. its tracking wheel seems to be out, the amount it is out varies so it hard to say by how much, but for example when loading filament it will ask for me to load somewhere around 650 mm of filament (because of bowden tube), but I will actually load somewhere around 620 mm before it tells me to stop and start the print. This could be a problem on larger prints as it could lead to the print getting out of sync. Its something I am watching for but I don't believe I have done a print large enough for it to be a problem.Software:Unfortunately this is where the palette seems to have issues. After setting up a print in the slicer (see the tutorials they are very helpful), the saved gcode must be loaded into the chroma software for post processing. Chroma will generate the files actually used to perform the print, unfortunately it is slow and seems to have issues.Chroma and the Firmware update applications are Electron apps (at least in Linux). Basically this means they are a web app wrapped in a browser engine and packaged into an app. Electron apps are always bloated, slow and general just not as good as regular applications but at least they work.Chroma presents a fairly simple interface and is easy to use. After setup its just a matter of loading a gcode file (with the option of setting tool head filament type/color) and letting chroma process it and then saving the results. Chroma will generate two files a .maf file for the palette and a new gcode file for the printer. This part of the work flow is direct, works well and the software provides a nice guide of what you need to do.However its object view is poor (slow and many artifacts when drawing) and it doesn't provide a proper gcode view of the movements. You can load the gcode it generates into a gcode viewer but chroma removes all tool change commands so the images are monochromatic and you can not visualize the changes and failures that chroma inserts in the print. It really needs a proper gcode viewer so that you can visualize the gcode it geneates with the filament/tool changes synced to the gcode.Chroma unfortunately does more than just insert gcode to generate the purge and reduce tool changes. It breaks generated tool paths apart and reorders them in strange ways. Example when I print two keychains in the same print side by side, printing them with a single filament results in one keychain layer being printed first, followed by the second. After chroma processing part of one keychain perimeter will print then the infill of the other, then it will jump back and print more of the others perimeter, and then back to the other and print its perimeter and then jump back and do the infill of the first, and then it will do its tool head transition/purge and similarly butcher the paths of that color. It does seem to work except the gcode its inserting to move the head doesn't take into account like zhop and avoiding crossing the print, so it will drag oozed color (say black) across the print leaving unwanted defects. This isn't a problem for side walls but is for top surfaces.In addition some times the conversion just seems to fail, I have prints that consistently have 1 bad layer in the middle where the rest of the print finishes correctly with everything in sync. Another curiosity is that using multiple objects to reduce amount of purge to print seems to cause more failures. Printing 1 object good, 2 objects good, 3 prints mostly good with one bad middle layer, 4 objects complete failure.Other problems I have noticed is purge to infill does not seem to be working, at least not with the prints I have watched. I do expect a purge block but none of the infill has any of the discoloration and the purge block does not seem to be smaller.Other:I have I yet had success with a 4 color print, I can't say if this is user error, software related or hw problems yet. I have only tried this a couple of times as I have wanted to make sure I have everything working well with simpler prints before I start chasing problems in 4 color prints.