Hi all,
I appreciate the suggestions shared here. We are aware of and looking into this issue. Due to hardware constraints, it is not a trivial one to fix. There certainly could be a more streamlined workflow here despite this. I will pass along both suggestions of the dipstick/measurement tool as well as a manual scaling feature in PreForm. Thank you again for working around this issue for the time being.
This is something i suggested a long time ago to your support folks… i’m very much ok. with the idea of getting a postal scale and then imputing a number in preform do do the calculation. or into the printers front panel “if needed” … this would at least get us close i would think!
Not that I haven’t commented on this before, but seeing as how there are some new ideas… I like the weighing concept. But not quite as described.
FL knows how much an empty cartridge weighs, and they know how much a liter of any particular resin weighs. And Preform knows how much resin is needed for a print. So Preform can do the math and pop up a message that says something like “the cartridge in your printer must weigh at least 227g (0.5LBs) for there to be enough resin for this print” instead of the totally meaningless estimate is provides now (currently, I have a completely empty T2000 cartridge in my machine that the printer insists is still almost 2/3rds full).
So if you were worried, provided you own a small Kitchen or Postal Scale, you could pop out the cartridge and quickly and accurately ascertain whether or not you have enough resin. If you weren’t worried you could just ignore the message (like when it’s a fairly new cartridge and you’re only printing something small).
And there’d be none of the constant consternation because the printer says the cartridge is empty when it’s not (or full when it’s not),
IMO bad data is worse than no data at all. Until there’s some kind of solution, the printer should just say “I have no idea how much resin is in the cartridge” so at least people could stop complaining about the estimates not being even remotely accurate.
Yeah i like that verify approach instead!
I wonder if a hardware add-on could be implemented, like a slim mini scale which connects to the cartridge’s pins (on the printer side), sending data to preform, sticked to the middle of the opening. Then the resin cartridge would sit on it.
I doubt the machine can be practically retrofitted with added HW to weigh a cartridge in-situ in the machine. That’d have been a good (though more expensive) way of doing it, but the machine would have to be designed for it from the outset (though who knows, maybe it was but the feature was eliminated due to cost). The slot the cartridge goes in to would have to be replaced by something that was “free wheeling” and couldn’t drag or bind and negatively affect the scale’s accuracy. It wouldn’t be cheap, and given FL’s conservative field service policy it’d unlikely to be something they’d offer for people to install themselves.
As Randy mentioned, hardware additions as a retrofit option would be a less feasible solution. With that said, I appreciate the added suggestions for how a manual workaround could function. I agree that bad data could be worse than no data in this case, and some combination of suggestions here could be a practical next step.