Perl program to make wipe towers Multi-color (Diamond Hotend)

thingiverse

I couldn't get wiping towers to work properly in the slicers so I wrote a Perl program to parse the G-code and inject wipe towers every time there's a tool change or whenever layer height changes, ensuring all towers are done for each layer. It then generates new G-code. It should handle variable layer height by examining the difference between previous and current Z heights. I figure there's plenty of configuration and optimization that could be done but it kind of works for what I need. Okay, yeah, I'm an average programmer so use at your own risk. In the image, you can see four color towers being put down in the back. USAGE: make_wipe_towers.pl input_file.gco tower_width_in_mm output_file.gco I'm sure there's a slicer or some program out there that already does what this is doing, but try as I might, I couldn't find one that worked so I just gave up and made my own. Updates 2019-02-07: 1. The wipe towers now do cross-hatching by switching 90 degrees on each Z-axis change. 2. For the first layer, it starts further to the left (1 square) so it can give more area for the first layer to stick. 3. The wipe tower now can have solid or less separation via a "sep" variable. 4. Added where if a color isn't used it just prints an empty box with an X for infill in an effort to save material, but then disabled it for now (future feature probably). 5. Added retract and Z up a bit between traversals. (Probably needs more retraction but at least it's added.) 6. If a color wasn't used, it puts the next wanted color down instead of transitioning to the color that wasn't used down and then transitioning back to the wanted color. Update: I uploaded pictures of the first print with the new wipe towers and it's definitely quite an improvement. You can see that before the wipe towers the eyes were gray and had purple in them, and the body was striped, etc. After the wipe towers the eyes are white and the body is not striped. Yay, it worked! I probably could have made bigger wipe towers to get even better colors but I think it's good enough as-is. All of the hairs are probably because I need to increase the retraction level before moving. Okay, yeah, I updated the model to make the eyes look forward and the smile was a little smaller and increased the infill a little to fix the back so it would close up, but you can get the idea with the better colors at least. There's three color filaments: purple, black, and white, and the gray is made by mixing. Update: When a color is not used, it does a grid on that tower instead of solid so that it doesn't use as much plastic. Update: It looks like the last update broke something, so I need to look into what went wrong – so be aware of that. The colors didn't switch like they were supposed to. :-( It does look like the retraction worked better, tho, so at least there's that. Update: I finally got around to looking at it. I think I fixed it, but I'll have to test it out to verify that it's actually fixed. ;-)