IMO, based on my experience working with their support people over the last couple years, a better solution for this will come along.
Well, even though it’s not a perfect solution, it’s better to have options to disable them than having a totally useless printer. But I can relate to your dissatisfaction, they could have done better and make the whole environment more “open”, but they chose not to. It’s a business strategy.
Until the machine breaks itself due to lack of PrintWatcher, which won’t be covered under warranty since it’s open material mode.
It’s frankly dishonest to market Open Material Mode without disclosing all of the features, especially the machine protection, that are disabled as soon as you switch to an open material profile.
I already told my business owner that I made a mistake buying this machine.
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direct quote from a FL Application Engineer
"Definitely sorry to hear that you are having issues with OMM. Unfortunately, the reality with SLS in general is that while running a material with known parameters is comparatively easy, tuning a new material and making it work perfectly is a much more difficult task, OMM is built for companies and teams with specific needs that are willing to do the development work to get different materials to work. I’ll definitely make that note to our product team of it not feeling transparent that it is not a plug and play tool like most of our other offerings.
As far as why the specific error is being removed entirely, it is because the way that it is tuned to work is non trivial, so tuning it from the user side would be extremely frustrating, and we can’t open it up to a point that it will be tolerant to all materials without effectively removing it either way."
I am still just dumbfounded that this is the solution. My primary job is working with million dollar cameras with live streaming, machine learning and AI detection. I love it when other people decide what would be too frustrating for me to deal with and just prevent me from having an option. The added demeaning explanation for sls is just icing on the cake. Its not like i am the Additive Manufacturing expert for an aviation company with a very specific need.
On a lighter note, i am almost done fine tuning my 3rd party material. Glad i found a work around instead of waiting for support to “help”.
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Latest update: Now the “camera too dark“ issue is gone on my printer, not sure it’s because the lighter color of the powder, or the firmware update has fixed that problem, anyway I’m relieved that this big guy finally starts to work again.
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if you changed powders, thats likely the issue.
I am still lying to my machine to get it to properly use my 3rd party powder without the too-bright error. I havent bothered with firmware changes.
no new firmware since april.
Support said “it will be a few weeks” before any patches would be released for the camera issues. nice to know that means 6 months at minimum.
Well that’s strange, because I used both lighter and darker powder (which was the same color as the one that triggered the error) and never encountered that camera issue again, perhaps it doesn’t require firmware updates but just the PreForm to do the trick? I think they might be able to diasble the print watcher in the slicing setting or sth?
That sounds possible. I haven’t dug into the print files yet to see what’s in there.
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BTW. Getting 3rd party material to work was easier than i expected and a lot easier than formlabs made it sound like it was going to be.
It’s “unfortunate” that formlabs has such a low opinion of people investing $65k in their ecosystem.
Its not my money and i still have buyers remorse. If i knew then what i know now, i would have advised the company to outsource the SLS parts we need until a better machine is available…but if formlabs buys up competitive companies, we may never see a truly open and affordable machine.
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