Smart Pause\Abort

As the Form 2 has so many sensors and preform is able to calculate how much resin a build should use then its feasible that a “Smart Pause\Abort” feature should be programmable into the firmware to abort a print if a larger amount of resin that expected is being consumed therefore avoiding the disastrous resin spillage scenario which can damage the machine.

The problem occurs if a part fails and falls off the bed causing a “tidal wave” effect from the wiper to slop resin over the side of the tank currently the Form 2 will keep refilling the tank and the wiper continues to slop the resin over the side and this continues until the resin cartridge is empty or the print “finishes”.

My thinking is that the Form 2 knows how much resin is in the cartridge and preform knows how much resin should be used per build/part. If at any point the resin use exceeds what is expected a failure is likely to have occurred so the print should Pause or Abort.

There are a few mechanisms in place to prevent spills The more common failure modes we see are either a part falling into the tank and causing a spill or the cartridge valve failing and dispensing too much resin. The wiper arm does have sensors which will detect when an atypical amount of force is required to perform the wipe movement. This will throw a ‘motors jammed’ error.

Dispensing resin is purely mechanical so we have a capacitive sensor behind the tank that keeps track of resin level. If this level is too high during a print, a ‘tank overfilled’ error will be thrown.

I have had prints where the raft sticks to the resin tank after say 10-20 layers such that it is tall enough to disturb the wiper but not big enough to trigger the motor jam. It ends up bending the wiper slightly then breaking free causing the wiper to splash resin with each cycle (like pulling a tree branch and letting it go). It adds up after hundreds of cycles and i had resin inside my machine (all is good though). I think David’s suggestion could work for massive losses of resin but it could be tough to create a spec that accurately detects abnormal resin loss without getting false positives and shutting down good prints.

Build failure detection and print abort i would think is high on their list of things to incorporate. I have no good ideas there but hopefully they do!

1 Like