I get that the idea was to never allow the printer to be remotely controlled (communication to Dashboard is strictly one-way, and you can only upload a model via PreForm, not start a print or cancel it) and i completely support that decision.
However, could Formlabs at least make it possible to preset all resin/cartridge level errors to ignore/continue before a print on the printer itself?
Here’s my use case…
When i end up with some leftover resin in then tank and just a tiny bit or none in the cartridge, i often use the opportunity to print some small parts (10-30ml) which i 100% know can be printed with the amount left. Usually it’s before i leave the printer unattended too. The way it currently is, i need to check on Dashboard, and phone someone to hit Continue for the first warning, then again for the second. On top of that, it often takes 30 minutes or more for printer to give up on trying to dispense resin. That’s a huge overhead on total print time.
A print-time toggle or checkbox that says ”ignore resin level errors” would go a long way to fixing this.
i think one thing would be to make the warning appear much sooner (as soon as you hit start), as the printer already knows the resin level is low in the cartridge.
It is indeed a pita to have to wait 30min in order to see a 45-60min print start. I’m currently trying to finish a tank of White V2 (already have a V4 tank for bigger prints) and frankly I’m starting to think it’ll be cheaper to just dump the rest of the resin rather than print it.
To top it, if a print is left hanging on a built platform, waiting for someone to press the continue button, there will be a line on the print when it is done.
To avoid this, I gravity feed one cartridge to another during printing when I know they are both almost done. But the new firmware makes cartridges unusable almost after only as low as one liter of resin through, so it is not possible anymore.
I could likewise use this feature and like @JohnHue’s suggestion of providing a sort of ‘ignore cartridge empty’ option when the ‘cartridge low’ message flashes. I’ve forwarded your suggestion to our software team.
The wait period isn’t because of temperature, it’s because it does X attempts to dispense resin before giving up. And the reason for X attempts is because some resins (like Tough) are super-viscous, and can take a long time to dispense. In fact, way back, Tough V1 would sometimes cause bogus errors, until the number of retries was increased.
Anyway, if you skip the warmup via the button, you will still need to wait because of that.
I would love to see this feature implemented. Man it is a true pain to wait about 30 minutes for your print to start when it should take just an hour or less to print.
Frew, i had another thing happen during an overnight print and this time I would consider it as a bug more than a “nice to have feature” (like the “ignore cartridge empty” ) :
Yesterday I started a Tough V4 print with an almost empty cartridge. I expected the printer to throw an error regarding resin levels so I waited 15-20min for the error to display before leaving the office… inconvenient, but it worked. At least that’s what I thought. Half-way through the print the Form2 threw a cartridge dispense error and stopped the print, which was completely unnecessary since I had already acknowledged that the resin was low. While it’s good that the printer continued dispensing resin, I think it shouldn’t have stopped a second time because it detected that the cartridge was now empty. I had to abort because this time I couldn’t afford the visible layer line that would have appeared, and another print was queued…
I guess that there is no way around the fact that the print times are noticeably longer when the printer is in the process of assessing if the cartridge is empty… which is also why I tend to avoid topping-off an almost empty cartridge OR pouring the rest in a new one, since this manipulation will only make the “resin low” errors appear for a longer period of time OR before the cartridge is actually nearly empty, respectively.
Please can we also remove the situation where it runs out of resin in an overnight print, but there is still plenty in the tray, so you come to it in the morning and press resume, but your print is ruined by a line across where it paused for hours?
There needs to be some intelligence to the decision please, where if there is only 50ml of printing to go, it should finish it, knowing there is 100ml still in the tray.
Dashboard can SMS you when it finally decides there’s not enough resin. But please add me to the crowd wanting a low/empty resin sense bypass. Not only for the initial 15-30 mins trying to fill the vat from an empty cartridge, BUT ALSO the subsequent “Resin Sensing” and error result after the first layer. One choice should cancel both. Have it logged if you need to, in case someone damages something as a result of using it and tries a warranty weasel. I often successfully print with only enough remaining resin for the wiper to smear across the PDMS for each layer.
If you want a justifiable reason for this feature, think of your new Color Kit. I’ll wager many users would only want one vat’s worth of a certain color, and with this feature they could use it all up without inconvenience, rather than dumping it, or worse, having to buy a whole new vat for the next color, just to leave the remaining few ml of the current color and its vat on a shelf, forever unused…,
According to the advice of Formlabs not to mix different versions of the same resin it would be great to be able to really use up an “old” version of resin.
We have following situation in our company: We started 3D Printing and the first included resin was “grey V3”. After some prints we’ve ordered new resins. The delivery included “grey V4”. We decided to mix them up and everything works fine. But to act properly we should have thrown the resin away. And I really don’t want to dump 250ml of expensive resin.
So please Formlabs include the function of “print it anyway”.
