According to Formlabs announcement about the new v4 grey resin it should be ok to mix it with v3 in an existing tank that already uses the older formulation. Has anyone here actually tried doing this yet? I have a fairly new tank and just put my last cartridge of v3 gray in the printer, but have no choice but to order v4 now. Hopefully there won’t be any issues mixing.
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Did you see this forum post on the changes? These use the same base formulation, but the supplier changed for one of the materials. Chemically, Grey v3 and v4 should be almost identical, and the versioning change was mostly done to help with tracking.
If the tank already has v3 in it, and the cartridge runs out, can the v4 cartridge be inserted to continue a print, or start a new one? On the Form 2, won’t it complain about a mismatch, or will the tank be ‘re-assigned’?
If a Grey v3 cartridge runs out mid-print, it can be swapped out for a Grey v4 cartridge. There will be a mismatch notification that can be bypassed to re-assign the tank to Grey v4.
How do you bypass it?
You just put the tank in and start the print, your Form2 will display a message warning you that the tank isn’t registered for the right resin or something similar, and you can choose to carry on anyway.
As @JohnHue mentioned, there will be a ‘continue’ option after the message pops up that will continue the print and re-assign the tank to the new material.
I was in a hurry and didn’t see that. Anyway I re-uploaded the file and I did see it that time. I got it going, thanks.
I was printing with v3, the cartridge ran out, and the print paused. I put in the v4 cartridge, and the only option was to abort. I tried sleeping, waking, etc., but it never showed a continue option. I eventually aborted the print and tried to start a new print. It would not allow me to continue a new print either. It simply displayed a message to insert a v3 compatible cartridge.
Is there some option that has to be enabled to get this to work?
Hmm, thanks for letting us know. This isn’t the intended behavior and I’ve forwarded this to our software team so that we can look into getting it corrected. While we tend to advocate against re-filling cartridges, it should be reasonably safe to fill the spent Grey v3 cartridge with a small amount of Grey v4 to complete the print.
If you do this in the middle of a print, it won’t work. You’d have to pour some V4 into the V3 cartridge to finish the print, or pour some V4 directly into the vat.
My comment was relevant to using a V3 filled vat with a V4 cartridge, not finishing a print which started with V3.
In the end, while it is possible to mix Grey V3 and V4, it is not supported by the software and you have to fool it for it to work. Overriding the alert saying that you’re trying to use a V4 cartridge with a V3 vat works under the assumption that you have emptied & cleaned the V3 vat.
I solved part of the problem. If the print was originally sent to the printer with v3 selected in PreForm, the only resin it will accept is v3. If you start a print using v4, and the tank has v3 in it, you will get a message to ignore it. The printer will then display another message telling you to thoroughly clean out the tank, then a confirmation that you have done so, then it will reassign the tank to v4 and the print will start.
This test was done with the latest firmware as of this writing: rc-115.4-160
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I agree that short of pouring v4 resin into a v3 tank, there is no way to get this to work. No, “Continue” or “Ignore” option appears. Basically it has to do with how the GCode was created in PreForm. If vX is in the GCode, there is no way to override that on the printer to mix cartridges mid-print. You have to re-use a cartridge with the proper chip (which makes sense in some cases).
In hind sight it would have been easy to pull out the v3 cartridge and pour in some v4 to get my print to finish but that doesn’t fully solve the problem. Once the print is done, you’d need to pour the v3/4 resin back into the v4 cartridge before starting another print or you will continuously be stuck in this situation.
It would be nice if the firmware had enough intelligence to determine if vX of a particular resin was compatible with another version of the same resin. That would solve this issue altogether.
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I had the same issue and I tried to reboot the machine. It wouldn’t let me reboot it so I just unplugged it and plugged it back in. I tried to print it again and this time it gave me an option to “ignore” where as before it just gave me the “abort” option only.
In the future, it would be great for Formlabs to name compatible resins with point releases such as Grey v3.1 so we don’t need to research if they can be mixed or not.
Agreed, that’s in the works.
Status on this? We really should have a way to switch from V3 to V4 mid-print. Thanks.
Hey all. I’m about to start a print, though I want to use my leftover v3 resin in the tank though the cartridge is close to running out. I have a full v4 resin cartridge, though don’t want to waste the v3. What would you folks recommend on doing?