Everyone check your heater

Not sure if this is a bug in Preform 3 update or my printer just went wacky at the same time.
I just went to swap out my resin tray while my printer has been asleep for the last day or so. When I pulled the tray out I literally burned my hand on the metal frame…The printer tray wasn’t burnt/melted. I unplugged the printer and will be plugging it back in to see if it was just a glitch.

Seems something has stopped the heater from turning off…
Never had this happen before the Firmware update last week… May be a coincidence but just in case check you machine to be safe… Don’t want to see anyone’s house.business burn down from a faulty heater …
Will be submitting a Ticket also.

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I checked once (after a print) and it was cold, I checked again after few minutes (after putting it to sleep) and it was warm and heating up.
I have disconnected the printer now, I feel uneasy to have a printer in sleep mode actually heating up!
If I think of it, after update I printed and put it to sleep. After hours I printed again and it was already at 30C … something is not right with the new FW

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I would agree, last night I left a print running. This morning I removed the print, before I removed the print I noticed that the temperature was displayed as 19.1c. I have not uploaded a new print, the printer was just waiting for me to confirm that the print was a success or failure.

It was clear that the heater had switched off at the end of the print, but confirming the print was a success started the heater. Surely it would be safer to start the heater when you either upload a job, or confirm you want to reprint one stored on the machine.

The heater was on and the resin had reached 36.6c.

I had left the printer on for many months, personal experience has shown that the most typical time for failure of similar hardware is when its booted up from cold - standby is much safer.

To me I see a printer with uncontrolled heating potentially a risk.

I wonder how long it will take Formlabs to sort the latest software issue out, o

As people complained last year about slow starts related to heating, many printer interactions will start the heater(upload a job, waking it from sleep, changing resins, etc).

I updated to the new firmware some days ago and mine was still cold this morning. I haven’t experienced any different behaviour than earlier firmware releases.

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I noticed a difference. Before the new fw a printer in sleep meant heater off. Now not.
I agree that some interaction should trigger heating but Formlabs needs to allow us to turn it off or customize the triggering even and, at the very least, show temperature on the dashboard.

Thanks for posting this heads-up. As a hobbyist, my printer isn’t always printing 24-7, so having the resin constantly at ‘ready to print’ temperature doesn’t make sense for my use case.

Would such a level of heating without printing decrease the lifespan of either the Form2 or the consumables (resin in the tray, the resin tray?) I’d hate to discover that the powered-on idle time is actively destructive, but better to learn that early in ownership than after damage is done.

I typically have left my Form2 idle for extended periods between prints, like I might do with a laserjet, so that it’s ready on the network to receive a job and go to work. Seems like that might have been a poor idea…

They did get back to me and ran a couple of tests and it seems to just have been a glitch as I can now not repeat the issue, But from now on for long periods of inactivity I just put it on a switched power strip and will turn it completely off instead of putting it to sleep.

One thing I have noticed on my touch screen is it will sometimes start thinking for itself… Trying to automatically start a print but can’t as the Hard start button isn’t pushed or will try to connect to wifi… I think my printer is starting to become self aware so I will become its evil overlord and deprive it of its power

Same here. But I keep,it connected and check it regularly as I print every day. I will disconnect it in case if long inactivity.

Hey everyone! Just wanted to hop in and maybe offer a little clarification.

The Form 2 automatically pre-heats and maintains a consistent resin temperature before and between print jobs. The following interactions trigger pre-heating:

-touching the touchscreen
-opening the cover of the printer
-uploading a print to the printer

Pre-heating stops if there is no interaction for 30 minutes. After completing a print, the printer holds the target printing temperature for 30 minutes to allow another print job to start immediately. As far as we’re aware, this heating and cooling(and maintaining a higher temperature when not printing) shouldn’t affect the longevity of the printer in any way.

If you feel like your heater behavior doesn’t fall into these buckets above, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team and we’d be happy to investigate more closely!

https://support.formlabs.com/s/contact-support?language=en_US

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This happened when the Printer was suppose to be in complete sleep mode (Hold the hard button for 10 seconds to put to sleep)
Will it still activate even while in that mode (Screen black)??

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