Preform crash and recovery while printing

I have only had this happen to me twice but I hit print and while uploading the job to the printer preform seemed to crash.

It was just sitting and not responding. I let it sit and spin for about 3-4x longer than the job takes (have printed it before) to upload to the printer. The printer was happily printing away but said waiting for layer 236 or something like that. What ever went wrong with preform or my system caused me to have to reboot. Mean while the printer is happily printing away and waiting for the next layer to upload. I re-launch preform and it says it crashed and asked if I want to recover which I do. It just loads up the last file (I’m guessing from the backup file it mentions right before printing starts) and that’s about it. It sees that it’s connected to the printer but the “form” button wont work. It keeps saying connect to printer. It is connected and waiting for next layer still. I don’t see any options to finish uploading the print or anything like that. After trying pause and a few other things I finally canceled the print.

Does preform and/or the form1 have the ability to reconnect and continue uploading a print job it the upload is somehow interrupted? If not it should be added as a feature request. The other time this happened to me I think I let a lot more of the file print before I saw the freeze up. I didn’t want to cancel the print because it was half way done that time when I noticed it had stopped uploading. At that point I had wasted a fair amount of resin but at least I could check to see if part of my print was working as expected. This time I managed to kill it soon enough that I wasted much less resin. It would be great if the printer could sound some kind of alarm if it’s taking to long to get the next layer. But again even better if you could recover and finish the upload to the printer.

The software is supposed to resume uploading if the printer gets disconnected and reconnected while preform is still running, but if the computer or Preform crashes, you’re SOL I think.

If you’re having frequent crashes you may want to wait until the model is completely uploaded before pressing the button on the Form1 to confirm.  It uploads much more quickly this way as well (but takes longer overall, as you don’t start printing until the upload is done.)