Form 3: owners questions and concerns

Hey Joxol.

Yeah, strangely it delaminated just before it even got to the legs of the supports, and printed a few layers on the flexible bed before that blocked the lasers from printing anything more - just about 20 layers printed and it was air printing after that until I realised. I was using the recommended setting for point size anyway as it was the first print on a new machine.

Hoping the next print comes out okay anyway as it’s a 25 hourer and for an impending client meeting!

Good luck, also a nice little tip if you run your machine really often, reboot it after ever print. I’m not 100% sure what the deal is but I noticed my print times becoming longer the longer I had the machine printing. A reboot seemed to have fixed the problem but I’d say the print is about 20-40 minutes longer than what is said on the timer. This could be an isolated problem to just me, but thought I’d throw out the tip regardless.

I thought the same, but:

  1. there’s no reason to have two dots for an ambient light sensor
  2. they’ve got different radii
  3. if you shine a light on them, it does not look like they’re transparent or like there’s a sensor behind them, and most importantly
  4. the screen brightness doesn’t really change

Then i thought - maybe they’re a speaker vent - they’re not through holes, but since there’s two layers of material between the outside world and the PCB with the screen, even having holes punched through just the layer beneath the lucite would make the speaker louder.

However, i don’t think the sound’s coming from there, so i doubt that’s what they are either… :confused:

I also had the idea they might be an unused presence detector - IR emitter and IR sensor - originally designed to wake the screen up when you approach it with your hand, but then unused because it was unreliable. But again - there does not seem to be a lense of any kind in either of the holes.

Yeah I had all those thoughts as well about the dots next to the screen, I thought most likely is could be a ‘touch screen’ IR on/off button, but it doesn’t seem to be. Definitely not the speaker venting, it must be a sensor of some kind.

A couple of observations I’ve made now that I’m on my third Form 3 print:

After the first fail, the second print (25 hours) came out beautifully (in tough resin)
I haven’t used tough resin before, but found it incredibly difficult to get off the bed - I’ve never experienced this to that degree on the Form 2
I’ve noticed that under the Form 3, Preform will not calculate print times (I’m using the most up to date Preform 3.1.1
Print times are significantly longer, although this has in part to do with using tough resin, while I normally use white or clear.

The simplest explanation (occam’s razor) is that it was supposed to be for something, but was abandoned and is now just - a set of holes.

From what i remember, it was pretty difficult to detach from the platform on Form 2 as well.

I’m a Solus user for 4 years. Just got a Form 3 really only for the larger build area, and planned on retaining the Solus for what it is best at.

So far I’m regretting the Form 3. All my prints to date have had artifacts (wrinkles) and are soft relative to the Solus. It’s only day 2 so hopefully things improve, but I’ve found threads here that suggest they may not.

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certamente você continuará decepcionado porque a form3 vai levar muitos anos luz pra ter a qualidade da solus, tenho uma form3 mas simplesmente fiz uma pessima escolha em comprar a form3, a resolução é muito ruim a form2 tem mais qualidade de resolução.

I have to disagree with you - all my prints from Form3 come out perfectly - really no complains, everything works as expected. All bugs I found during my work were fixed quickly in the next firmware releases. The quality of the mechanic of Form3 is just above other SLA printers.

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