3D Printed Four Player Chess

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Travel Four Player Chess Board

I designed and printed a four player chess set, which can be packaged into a relatively small space. the outer 3 by 8 sections that each player's pieces start in can detach, allowing it to be stored in the same size as the inner 8 by 8 section. removing the outer sections also allows normal two player chess to be played on the board. the chess pieces I printed are hexagon chess pieces I found on thingiverse. all the models that I made I used openscad for.

the list of things that were printed for this are

main 8 by 8 board
two 3 by 8 boards with the colors one way
two 3 by 8 boards with the colors the other way
four sets of chess pieces
eight connecters
box

picture of all the things that were printed

getting the chessboards to print with two colors was a fun challenge, especially to get them to print with the least effort on my part. the easiest to set up was to just do two prints, the squares and the back, and to change the filament between the prints. the things that I don't like about this approach are

printer will cool down in between the prints
the printer might home with slight differences for the two prints

the way I ended up handling it was to make a new profile in the slicer, which I called ender 3 manual dual filament. in the profile I said that the printer has two extruders, each doing a different color. when it was time to switch the extruder it was using, the command was M600. what that gcode command does is

pause the print
park the print head
eject the filament
beep and wait for you to put the new filament in
purge the filament
resume the print

naturally it didn't just work like that, instead it completely ignored that command and started printing the whole thing in one color. it turned out that the stock firmware did not have the M600 command implemented. this meant that I had to find an alternative or put custom firmware on the printer. the first thing I did was to find an alternative. instead of the M600 I wrote

switch to relative moving
move up
pause
move back down
switch back to absolute moving

the bad news is that after being paused for too long it would disable the steppers and misalign the print. in the end I just put custom firmware on the printer with the ADVANCED_PAUSE_FEATURE and NOZZLE_PARK_FEATURE enabled.

two player chess on top of the box with the 8 by 8 board face up on top

box with the 8x8 board upside down on top as a lid

view of the inside of the box without the lid on it