Palette 2S - Simple Multi-Material 3D Printing on Your 3D Printer

I saw the Palette advertised a few years ago, and was so excited about this tech. Unfortunately, the reviews were mixed, and leaned a more toward the negative. When I heard frustration being discussed on my favorite 3D Printer podcast, I was convinced to stay away for the time being. I totally forgot about the product, until a few weeks before writing this review, when I had some extra cash to spare. I thought I'd see how far its gotten, as I had no idea there was a Palette 2, let alone, an upgraded S version.After watching youtube videos and reading tons of reviews, I was still a bit skeptical. This time around, most reviews were positive, but it seemed like not everyone was satisfied. The other factor was most of the latest reviews covered the Palette 2 and its predecessor, but not the 2S. I joined Mosaic's Facebook page, and now I was able to see some amazing creations, and saw quite a bit of praise and enthusiasm among the members. Life is too short, so took the leap. I also purchased the Canvas Hub, which allows your printer to work directly with the Palette, without having to save creations on SD cards and loading them into the printer. The Hub is wireless and gives you excellent control over both palette and printer.Shockingly enough, set up was easier than I thought. The little Canvas Hub accessory actually took longer to configure. The Palette's on-board display hand holds you through the entire process. I downloaded their recommended calibration object (a Mosaic Logo Keychain) into Canvas, which is their cloud-based slicing software. The object only required 2 colors for this first test. After a quick slice, I sent it off to the Canvas Hub which readied it my printer. Here is where the Palette 2S prompted me to load in any 2 colors, as they easily and automatically fed into the unit. You can remove the front magnetic panel to watch all the cool internal workings going on. Once the Palette does its preparation and slicing, it will send out some filament to be loaded into the gears of your printer's extruder (I'm using an Ender 3 Pro). Now, you can either manually feed it through, or use the Palette's Smart Load feature, which when selected, will take care of the filament's travel to the hot end. The whole setup to print, takes a few minutes. Once the Palette is ready, the start button will appear, and now you're off and running. The rest is in the Palette's hands, while you're free to do other things.OK, I was so not expecting the very first calibration print to be perfect, but...surprise! It was two different manufacturer's Filaments (one was that popular silky PLA that has a sheen) that fused together nicely. The result was stunning, for a first attempt, even though it was a simple keychain. Now I was just as pumped as I was when my first 3D print came out of my Ender 3 Pro last year.From that point on, I've loaded up 4 color .stl files from Thingiverse, along with some of my own creations as the Palette learns, by fine tuning itself with each print. You simply choose the save or ignore opinion when your print is complete. The Canvas software has some super features, like being able to paint up to four colors, even on a standard, single color STL. One of the newer features is called Stamp, which gives you the ability to apply any logo or graphic to your object. The Palette itself has easy to use, built in fun features like automatic Gradient and Random Color modes. You simply select these on the Palette's display, and watch the amazing results.The Palette 2S is by no means perfect, but in the world of 3D Printing, nothing is (ask any enthusiast). For one thing, it will eat up extra filament with each print (compared to a single color object direct from printer), as it needs to create what's called a purge block; that's how the Palette lets out enough color from the nozzle, in order for the next color to make a clean entry. The purge block prints along side of your object, so your extruder will be alternating between the two throughout the entire print. This, unfortunately also adds more printing time and wasted filament, but the Canvas software does allow you to tweak the configuration to help speed things up and use less plastic. Other than that necessary issue, the small set up between each print adds more time to the whole process.One feature the Palette lacks and which I didn't expect, is the ability to tell the system to print only a single color object. I was under the assumption, that when I needed to do single color prints (for a side business), I can select one of four colors, and print. This would eliminate having to load up filament direct from my printer's spool, and I'd have a choice of 4 colors to choose from at my disposal (without having to change filament reels). This is not the case. The palette only understands multi-color prints. Your object must have a minimum of 2 colors, in order for Canvas to create the special file which the Palette looks for. There are ways around this limitation, using another of the Palette's features not normally meant for this, but it requires too many extra steps to bother. In comparison, loading a single reel direct from your printer's spindle would wind up being much faster.In closing, I'm ecstatic about this hardware addition. It's the type of tech, that keeps you up at night, thinking of what you want to print the next day -- and hats off to tech support who are helpful and friendly! You can wait for technology like this to improve over time, or you can enjoy it now as the system is finally up to par. With Covid-19 overstaying its unwelcome, I couldn't have picked a better time to purchase.

The Palette 2s works great, I wouldn’t recommend for someone with absolutely no knowledge about 3D printing but if you have a basic understanding of the 3D printer’s hardware or you just do your research, this will work great. One thing I would like to note is that in dzyner’s review of this product, he said that the 3D printing YouTubers are paid, this is just not true, they are given the item, or they buy it themselves and they review it for what it is even if it is a bad product. This however is not a bad product but it is loud, if you put the cover on the palette it muffles the fan noise though. On print quality, it doesn’t effect the print quality of my Original Prusa i3 MK3s+ and it prints just as perfectly as before. The Palette was easy to set up and within about an hour I got it working and another hour to get it working well. The Palette has great features and they all work just as expected. The Palette lets me tune filament splices easily and the pre-printing process is a breeze. If you want to learn more about the palette before you buy it, I recommend The 3D Printing General’s extensive YouTube review series on the Palette and also Chris Riley’s video on the set up process.

Once you get the calibration figured out just right it will make amazing prints, however my only complaint will be its speed I had to slow my print speed away down so the palette could keep up the splices with my printer(FLSun QQ-s)... it states 60-120mm/s but I couldn't go faster than 50mm/s.. maybe I should of got the pro version... but who knows if the extra 100 would have been worth the speed increase it might be very slight b/c they're specs are very far off of reality.... other than that this device works perfectly especially when used with octoprint... if i could print a lil faster i would of given all 5 stars

i really wanted to like this product and really had high hopes and big plans for using it but at the end of the day and after many tries to get it working reliably its just not reliable enough for me to use it with my printing business which is what i bought it for and that sucks big time. Not to mention two days after i bought it the new one dropped for about the same as what i paid (albeit you had to preorder for that price but still) it doesnt matter though because if it doesnt work then whats the point? I constantly had issues with getting things calibrated even after calibrating my esteps to perfection this thing couldnt keep track. I found that sometimes i could get it to work with some prints but the longer the print the higher the probability went up that it would have a issue or failure of some sort which in theory makes sense but when i paid this much for this product i expected it to just work the way it was meant to work. I mean this isn't a cheap piece of equipment!!! Sadly at this point i think i rather resell mines recoup my costs and continue using my other idex printers and gcode pauses to do multi colors i mean that is free and it just works unlike this machine. Yes this would have made the process way more convenient had it worked though.

So to start off Mosaic Help Desk is wonderful. 5 stars for them....They have done all they can to fix the challenges I have faced with this machine. Even replaced my slicer.My Setup:CR10S Pro V2Typically only print PLAGetting the initial color tuning was a real trick, You would get the keychain right, then go to another project and the colors would leak, Lines of color showing up where they were not suppose to... All sorts of issues. SO you'd have to start over from the beginning.After 3 weeks, I finally got it tuned where I could make consistent prints. The key word here is consistent. It really is hit or miss whether or not you'll get a successful print.Here is all that that happening:Printer wants filament faster than Palette 2 S can make it so it snaps the filament inside the palette.. Even when you slow down 'Speed during slice to 10mm per sec. Line breaks inside palette. No "Warning, or pause. Printer doesn't recognize it, runs print to completion with no filamentPalette Smart Load decides your distance has changed. End up with colors in wrong spot.Filament line feed inside palette jumps track. Just get a horrible noiseFilament gets pushed back out to far, Palette cant retrieve it, kills print.Just to many things to go wrong, and even after a month of tweaking, splice tuning, trying every splicer known to man, I still cant get a 10 for 10 print run without one of the things above happening.FYI, this is all on top of what could potentially happen with printer during prints.....They have bugs, in their feed algorithms and really don't have this quite figured out yet.Maybe Palette 3 will address some of this stuff.But between tuning, and troubleshooting and constantly monitoring the palette you'll get to a point where its just not worth the effort and time.Of course all of this on top of the Filament waste.I am hoping they get this figured out.