Best Practice for Swapping In & Out Tool Heads

So I have recently acquired, and installed the new SL Tool Head for my Taz 6 and love it. However, while great for nice, detailed prints, there are times I am going to want to do quick, bulky prints, at like 0.3 mm layers. This of course isn’t what the SL is for and is better served for the original tool head that came with the printer.

But I was wondering, what is a good practice for swapping back and forth tool heads? Do I literally just put on the other head, update the Z-Offset and E-Step (and of course use the correct CURA profile) and I am all good? I am going to assume I don’t have to install Firmware regularly when swapping, since that really doesn’t make sense to me to do (I’m net even sure how I would even do so anyway with the stock single extruder tool head, since there’s no option in CURA to do this).

(For the record when I installed the firmware when installing the SL Tool head, the two parameters mentioned were the only ones to change).

You will need to flash your firmware when switching back to the stock toolhead, the reason for this is that the firmware on your printer tells it which toolhead is currently installed and allow the printer to account for the slight variances from toolhead to toolhead. We have a guide that goes over flashing the firmware here: https://www.lulzbot.com/learn/tutorials/firmware-flashing-through-cura
The process to flash the firmware is basically the same as it would have been when you flashed the firmware for the SL toolhead you received. You will select the printer profile for the setup you are moving to then click on the light green box where your printer name is displayed in the upper right of Cura, select manage printers which will open your preferences page. From here click on the button that says Upgrade Firmware. Along the bottom of the new window that opens select the button labeled Automatically Upgrade Firmware. This will flash the firmware on your printer to whatever profile you selected in Cura at the start of this process. (You will want to make sure you are updating your E-Steps and Z-Offset anytime you flash your firmware.)

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Thank you very much for this. I actually just swapped back my heads today after having an issue with the SL head, and had it not line up correctly. Came back to read this and went “yep that would explain it”

What do you all do to manage the settings? I was thinking about just ignoring the stored settings on my Taz 6 and setting them in gcode. I was thinking of setting the esteps and z offset via the startup script for in Cura and Simplify3D. That way I could easily switch between tool heads on a print by print basis.

Have any of you had luck flashing the firmware using Firmware Updater?

I use the OctoPrint plugin Firmware Updater all the time on my TAZ 6. I use the plugin Custom Control Editor and have defined controls to set E-Steps, Z-Offset, Load Settings, Save Settings, etc.

The only issue I have with the Firmware Updater is it doesn’t “remember” URLs for firmware. Multiple enhancement requests (issues) have been opened.

Modifying the start gcode is also an option. I use both CuraLE and Simplify3D and have modified the start gcode for my Dual Extruder V3 to include M218 commands to set the nozzle offset for both slicers. CuraLE wants to handle the offset in the slicer, S3D prefers to let the firmware handle it. To keep OctoPrint’s GCode Viewer happy, I’ve defined separate Printer Profiles for each toolhead and each Slicer (for the Dual Extruder profiles).

I haven’t had luck with firmware updater over the past few days. I get a checksum error when the printer boots. What settings are you using?

I believe the checksum error is the EEPROM on the printer, do an M501 followed by an M500 and that should fix it (M503 to show settings).