Few years back I designed some 3d printed tags we can attach to the beams above our printers. This made it easy at-a-glance we could easily tell what color and type of material was loaded into the printers.
When I started more multi-color products that went beyond our usual yellow/black color scheme, I wanted to refresh the idea… So i designed some updated tags which have worked out really nicely.
If i were using an AMS, i could put as many tags as were loaded. This made it extremely to see the colors loaded when sending jobs compared to selecting the printer and waiting an unknown number of seconds to see what was loaded.
In an instant i could tell that 4 printers had red/white/blue meaning i could send the flags to those 4 quickly and easily.
The main limitation of this approach seems to be the lack of a material type.
So i’m back at it designing a slight modification to these tags.
This time we’ll attach a small magnetic tag over our logo showing off what material it is:
The old tags used 8 magnets where these new tags only use 3. 2 for the color tag and 1 for the material tag.
I will print these face-down which will embed the texture into the user-facing side of the material coin.
The extruded partial logo will allow these tags to easily pop-into our logo on the color tag and keep them aligned, and the magnet will be attracted to the magnet within the color tag under the logo.