I’d love to be able to have the ability to save different settings to print with
That is an awesome idea!
I fly Radio Control and this is a common feature on the battery chargers I use. Instead of having to figure out the correct settings for the charger for each pack (not that it’s a major effort, but it’s extra steps and it’s easy to make a mistake), I have a half-dozen custom “presets” saved on the charger and labels on my Lithium batteries that say “Preset A” or “Preset E” or whatever.
So I’d say that the requests that’d change “it’s not really all that open when you get right down to it” mode to “this is truly open” mode include:
- Ability to enable heater and to set a temperature
- Ability to enable the wiper and set a swipe speed
- Ability to specify laser “power” parametrically (vs. having to choose a FL Resin “equivalent”)
- Ability to save these settings as a preset that can be recalled later
One can only wonder if FormLabs actually wants to support “Open Mode” or if they’re going to intentionally limit the printer’s functionality in order to force the user base to buy their resins in their cartridges to make full use of the printer’s capabilities. The “we don’t want you to damage your printer” argument is specious. A simple “warranty is voided under the following conditions” would be all it’d take to address that and then we could experiment at our own risk with whatever we wanted to experiment with…
Having spent almost 40 years in the computer industry doing software, firmware and hardware development for everything from cash registers to nuclear power plants, I think I can say with a fair certainty that these would be easily implemented features (unless the code base is very, very poorly implemented, which I doubt).
So how’s about it, FormLabs? Let us use all the features of our new (expensive) Form2 as we see fit!