We had a power outage in our lab (the form3 was already 18 hours printing). I find it really ridiculous that the printer cannot continue printing, given that attention has already been given to it on the forum in recent years.
Can someone explain to me why this is so difficult to implement?
In addition, the job in the dashboard continued, it did not seem to understand that the printer had stopped, there is also not a cancel button at the platform.
Invest in a UPS, an absolute must in any professional setting.
I’m really sorry to hear about the print stoppage issues. I absolutely understand how frustrating that can be.
There are a lot of aspects to SLA printing that make restarting after an indefinite pause pretty tricky, and if the printer loses power completely, the printer won’t know how long it’s been off. Things like heat loss, resin shrinkage and more all come into play.
This isn’t an excuse, just an explanation. Like I said, it’s really annoying to lose progress like that. As suggested, a UPS is a great thing to have to prevent this sort of issue from affecting your work in the future.
In the interest of nice clean power, my F3 is on a moderately expensive Eaton dual-conversion UPS (9PX1000iRT2U).
Aside from the much cleaner output power, unlike line interactive units you can stack a whole bunch of battery expansion packs on if you need the runtime. I think up to four, on my model.
The F3 doesn’t actually use a whole lot of power though so you can skimp on the VA rating quite a lot; during the beginning of the print when it’s heating the resin aggressively (probably also the higher exposure for the first couple of layers) it peaks at around 120W, and settles down to around 50W for the remainder of the job. This is printing in black, for all the difference the power of the laser is likely to make to the overall consumption of the machine.
Here’s power consumption and runtime during a print job, as measured from my UPS by SNMP:
Fairly confident of 2+ hours runtime for all but the early stages of the print job, I can live with that just fine. With just one extra battery pack you’d get 5.
