Printer claims resin cartridge is constantly being removed and inserted

Support & Troubleshooting Form 2
1

I was printing yesterday using my usual cartridge of white resin - in fact I’ve not touch my setup in a few weeks - and notice the printer was continually telling me that the cartridge had been removed … and then would immediately tell me it had been inserted. This happened continually and turned a 3 hour printing job into something closer to 5. I’ve not touched my setup and the only major change has been the firmware update that came out the other week. Is anyone else seeing this? Does anyone know what the cause might be?

Thanks

2

Try removing and reinserting the cartridge a few times.

3

I tried that - seems to help for a while then it’s back to remove/insert again.

4

Hey Tim,

I encountered this during beta testing of the Form2; it nearly drove me crazy.

Thankfully the great folks in Customer Service tracked it down.
The problem is an electrical short caused by the contacts on the bottom of the resin tank touching both the resin tank chip reader and the base of the printer.
The solution is to prevent the connection from shorting by placing masking, electrical, Kapton or any non-conductive tape along the right side of the Resin Tank chip reader.

Hope this works for you as well.

-JD Davison
The Lab Partners

5

Thanks - I’ll give this a try this weekend.

6

Well I gave the tape a try, but no luck. Still seeing this:

IMG_1100.jpg800×1067 160 KB

As well as a similar ‘removed’ version. I just tried cleaning the contacts on the cartridge but that made no difference. Could the cartridge itself be damaged in some way?

7

Just submitted a support ticket - we’ll see if there’s any official diagnosis.

8

Also been getting this error - the cartridge is still inserted of course. Removing and re-inserting clears the error - temporarily.

IMG_1103.jpg800×1067 163 KB

9

While trying to debug this, I’ve found sticking a can on the top of the cartridge to be remarkably effective at stopping this error:

IMG_1104.jpg800×1067 169 KB

Meanwhile, the support people at Formlabs are trying to find a proper solution to my problem.

10

If adding weight to the cartridge prevents the issue, the problem is mechanical. Not something that can be fixed in Firmware. FormLabs may be able to fix it, but they’ll have to make a mechanical change to the cartridge to do it.

Though I suppose they could “debounce” the detection, once the cartridge is detected, if the printer sees the cartridge being removed, it should wait some time, like 5 seconds or something, and check again and only report the cartridge as removed if it still shows as not being present. So if there’s an intermittent connection (which it seems like there is based on the symptoms) the printer will “ignore” the glitches…

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