8-Track Is an Eight-Color AMS for Voron 3D Printers

Bambu Lab is undeniably the darling of today’s proprietary consumer 3D printer market and the AMS (Automatic Material System) is one of the major selling points. It lets users print multiple filament materials and colors on a single model — four per AMS unit, chainable up to 16. That is very cool and everyone loves it, but Bambu Lab products are proprietary. Where can open source enthusiasts turn for something similar? In the near future, they’ll be able to take advantage of the 8-Track modular automated filament changer.

8-Track is an open source design that can be adapted to almost any 3D printer, but you will see it most closely associated with Voron. This may be controversial, but I consider Voron to be the current king of the open source 3D printing community. It stole that title from Prusa, which has been releasing underwhelming designs for several years now.

Prusa’s own filament changer, the MMU (Multi-Material Unit), has been fraught with problems, so the 8-Track may appeal to those users. Voron users have had the ERCF (Enraged Rabbit Carrot Feeder) to satisfy their multi-color and multi-filament needs, but its design is similar to the Prusa MMU and tends to be just as finicky. The 8-Track attempts to solve some of those problems with a modular system that users can expand as needed.

That modularity is nice, because some users may only want to swap between two materials (primary and support, for example), while others may want as many materials as possible. With 8-Track, a user can simply add as many cassettes as they require. Despite the name, it will be possible to use more than eight of them.

In his video introducing the 8-Track, Armored_Turtle provided some interesting details. For instance, the extruders have servo-driven mechanisms to bite down on the filament and increase grip when feeding — but can let go to reduce friction entirely once the filament reaches the hot end. Each module can also be scaled up or down to fit the desired printer. There will even be an optional active drying heating element for each cassette to combat moisture headaches.

Though this is open source, it is still a work in progress and so the design isn’t published to a public repository quite yet. But Armored_Turtle promises that it is coming soon and more details should become available at that time.