How are you supposed to troubleshoot a Form 3+

Support & Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

I have been lurking on this forum for a while and finally had to make an account due to some problems of my own.

Unfortunately our Form 3+ randomly decided it no longer felt like printing. It will be stuck on ‘Preparing print’ for a while, and then just state a very generic error that it failed (without an error code), and a QR code. One would think that scanning the QR code would lead one to a support page with some further info - but no, it just leads to formlabs.com , meaning we have absolutely no idea where it’s getting stuck.

The next logical step would be to get the logs from the printer itself - but whenever we try to get the logs from the printer it gets stuck on 25%.

What we have tried so far;
-Reseat the build plate (completely fine, it’s clean and detected properly)|
-Try a new cartridge (completely fine, properly detected)
-reseat the tank (also completely fine, properly detected)
-Change materials and tanks (worked fine, both properly detected)
-Manually do motor movements to make sure everything can move properly (passed just fine, and homes just fine afterwards)
-Make sure no resins have leaked anywhere (we had a rather inconvenient tank leakage over a year ago, but that was properly cleaned out and taken care of, so should not be of note for now)

The only that that looks suspicious to me is the fact that the internal storage is COMPLETELY full; 0.00MB free. I have tried to delete all the prints in memory, but that either fails or doesn’t accomplish anything. The queue is now empty, but the storage is still 100% filled - but we don’t even know if this is an actual issue since we don’t have any information to go on.

Any advice on how to proceed?

Thanks.

1 Like
2

Hi @PizzaTijd ,

Sorry to hear about your issues! Do you have a picture of the error message? If I were you, I would reach out to our support team by opening a support case. Please include the serial name of your printer, and also a picture or video displaying what’s happening. If Dashboard logging is enabled, they might see something in your logs already.

A less ideal solution, because it deletes logs too, is trying to do a factory reset. This would free up space and may correct unusual printer behavior.

3

Unfortunately, logs cannot be prepared if there is no space on storage :confused:
I think the best option is to do a factory reset.
If the problem was caused by a lack of space in storage, it will disappear, if not it will back.

Sebastian

4

It seems that doing a factory reset fixed the lack of storage. I do find it weird that the printer doesn’t reserve any space for functionality that should be deemed as critical (like troubleshooting through logs or error messaging).

Edit: just a quick clarification that the lack of storage was seemingly also the issue of the printer refusing to print and keep logs.

3 Likes
5

Hello @PizzaTijd I also have a Form3+, how much time did you use your printer till this issue appears?

6

Approximately 2 years

7

Thanks for the feedback, hope everything works now!

8

so far so good