Scheduled/immediate preheat and mix function

#1

I use our fleet of printers almost every day and as we approach winter in my country I was thinking how great it would be to schedule a morning warmup and mix of the resins we are currently using.

If I could tell my printer to continuously heat and mix from 8:30am to 9:00am the next morning before we get to work it would be instantly ready to use.

Another example. We switch to a Flexible resin tray that’s been in storage for over a month. Those that use this material know that it ‘settles’ over a decent amount of time.
Having the option to perform the above operation immediately after a tray swap would save us having to remove the wiper and manually do this for a few minutes while the resin is cold.

Proposal.
Allow a selectable preheat temp.
Run wiper back and forth continuously for a selected amount of time once preheat temp is reached.
Allow this function to be scheduled or run immediately upon request on the local machine interface.

Cheers

#2

Something like this would be great. It’s been suggested a few times now by various users (including myself - and in that thread @gtl mentioned it’s been captured on their roadmap).

#3

When the resin is cold, it’s too viscous and the mixer arm detaches. The printer needs a “preheat” but IMO it ought to be separate from “premix”. I want to warm my printer up before it attempts to move the mixer, so I don’t have to reach in to a gooey, sticky tank to put the mixer back in place to start my print.

#4

Absolutely, The mix function should only happen after the resin is warmed up.

#5

Very good idea, I hope Formlabs will bring this to the next software version.

#6

Which would also be good when you are done with the print that you could select, shut down the printer. I often have prints that take over 24 hours. And when you are not at home, it is on all the time and costs electricity Of course using the device day and night would of course be nothing

#7

I would love a preheat function.

The easiest way to get Formlabs to actually implement this very easy feature is for everyone to send a support ticket about this so they have lots of tickets requesting it.

#8

When the F3 first came out the heater was always on so there was no heat-up time and people complained.
Now the heater starts with a print and people complain.

Sometimes I think ytha Formlabs just can’t win.

Me, I think that having a always on heater is just fine and a much better solution that having to remember to switch the thing on hours* before I want to start printing.

*The printer took 6 hours to warm yesterday.

#9

Thanks for the input everyone! As mentioned, please keep telling us what you need! Even if we can’t implement things immediately, we like to know what folks are looking for!

There are some heating things in the pipe that will hopefully solve at least some of these concerns. :slight_smile:

#10

Just to followup here - I’ve found a workaround for this - see this thread: PREHEAT work-around!