I know this topic has been discussed plenty before. But come on, FL!
I’ve got an empty Tough 2000 cartridge and a resin tank that’s better than half full. I want to print a job that will use 25ml, which is easily still contained in the tank. I’m going on better than an hour at this point, waiting for the fill to abort itself so I can say “ignore” and get the damn print started.
There’s a button on the lower left of the screen that says “ABORT PRINT”. How about adding one on the lower right corner that says “ABORT FILL”? How hard can that be?
I went off to do other stuff while waiting for the fill to time out. Monitored by web. About 30 minutes after the status panel said “fill error”, I went down to my workshop and told the printer to ignore the error and continue. It went in to “preparing tank” and did about 5 minutes of slow back and forth with the wiper. Then it emitted a couple of seconds of loud rapid-fire clicking, and then it went back to “preparing tank” and started the slow wipe again. This repeated twice more before I clicked “abort print”. But when I did that, the build plate cycled down like it was actually going to print, even going as far as the slow wipe to wet the bottom of the build plate before it aborted.
So now I get to go through the whole waiting-for-the-fill-to-time-out thing again before I can determine if the last issue was a glitch or my printer is busted.
When the job started, Dashboard said the job would take 3 hours and 54 minutes. So a pretty bad print time estimate. Raises a question… does the printer move “slower” when it thinks there isn’t a lot of resin left?
I notice that below some level, the resin doesn’t flow back very quickly to cover the entire bottom of the tank after a wiper sweep. Does the printer know that and wait longer after a sweep? Meant to take a look, but went to bed last night without remembering and the job finished while I was asleep. Might explain why the job took so much longer to complete than Preform thought. I’ve never seen Preform be this far off on time…
Yes, when there is a risk that there is a low level of resin in the tank the machine slows down and waits longer at each layer. I’ve seen some crazy times like that before.
Mine never gave me an option or timed out when the tank was empty despite there being PLENTY in the tank. Instead, it told me I had a mis-matched tank. Nope, it was just empty.
I won’t be able to use the last half to two thirds of a tank of resin if it keeps that up. So if I decide not to use a given resin anymore, but to use it up, it looks like I’ll throw most of the last container away. Not acceptable!
I recently discussed a skip fill feature during a conference call with several members of the Formlabs team… they asked some questions about the painpoints and I got the impression it’s on their radar.
Yeah. But when the tank is low on resin, it takes the resin 10-15 seconds to flow back and cover the bottom of the tank after a wiper sweep. The printer appears to run slower between layers to allow more time for the resin to move back. If you spoof the float with a piece of tape, the printer thinks the tank is full and wouldn’t slow down to let the resin flow back, and I’d expect prints to be more likely to fail…
