Has manual preheating / mixing been implemented yet? Also remote temperature reporting?
In colder environments preheating and mixing can exceed the length of a small print job by an order of magnitude or more, making end times completely unpredictable.
It would seem an essential feature to be able to start such an action remotely (whether primed or not) so that the printer can be prepared in advance of sending a print to it. e.g. a schedule to say start preheating at 5am or whatever could be set to ensure the printer is READY to actually start printing first thing after “priming”.
That way the first few layers can be watched in person to check for print failures and make better use of time - have a print available during working hours too.
Also if preheating times / temperature can be monitored then we can learn the characteristics of preheat and set a sensible expectation based on ambient temp.
I feel your pain. I keep my printer in a cosy this time of year to keep temperatures up. Some additional tricks to keep your printer working:
Don’t prime it if you can avoid it. I find that the fan turns on as soon as I prime it, which quickly reduces the resin to room temperature. Turning on heating during priming would be nice to have; I guess that’s a subset of what you’re proposing.
The printer cosy helps things warm up faster, but I’ve also been gradually adjusting my minimum acceptable start temperature downward … a personal minimum of 28C makes a huge difference in heating time, and I haven’t experienced any adhesion problems.
It is in a ‘cosy’ of sorts - bubble wrap and a box over the top. It does help. I don’t think there’s a way to change the heating target so I’m curious how you perform your personal minimum of 28C?
Unfortunately it has to be left primed in order to remotely start a print, although it would be a waste of power to have it heating then, as the next print time is of an arbitrary nature… Really to make best use of power what we need is a way to remember the primed status so we can remotely power down (smart socket) and back on the printer when time to print something, and it will recognise the fact it was primed before the power ‘failed’.
As for the heating, I had an instance only in the last week or so where it was heating from 15 to target 31, started at say 8:00, at 9:59 it was 30.7 and still rising (as noted on remote camera recording), then bang at 10:00 it ‘timed out’ and stopped, 0.3C short of target.
This logic needs improving - it should not time out blindly after 2 hours (especially when it was just a few seconds off reaching target), instead it should time out after say 30 minutes of no increase.
That and a way to remotely control the display, so we can hit retry without travelling to get to it and having a print finish at a time that is very inconvenient meaning the resin’s cooled off again by the time you get to it and it’s harder to clean the excess away.
I just meant that I check on it in person every 20 minutes while heating, and as soon as it hits 28, I choose the “Skip” option. Sounds like you’re more remote than I am, so probably not helpful.
I think they’ve removed the Skip option in later firmware or it’s only available on certain resins as it was not an option last time I saw it (at least with Tough 2000 and Black I think).
