I can attest to F2’s near-sentient attempts to thwart the wringing of every last drop of resin from a cartridge. But other than a personal sense of thriftiness or other victory, what positives do you get from doing it? Maybe this is a “choose your battle” situation.
F2 tells you when the resin is low before the bad behavior sets in. You KNOW you’ll have to buy more resin sooner or later, so simply why not sooner rather than later? I get if you don’t want to pay the extortionate prices until absolutely necessary, but when is that? After you pull your hair out fighting the uphill battle of forcing the F2 to act clearly contrary to its capitalist programming? And then you STILL have to buy new resin, at the same high price, but now with an extra helping of resentment and lost time/hair added on.
Trust me, just buy the damn resin when you know you’ll need it. That’s the system, they call the shots, you can’t game it, you can’t rig it. Buying Formlabs resin always hurts. Don’t Sisyphus yourself into making it hurt even more. As objectionable a system as it is, we all agreed to it when we clicked “Buy Printer”.
That’s not the issue. Even if I have some resin in stock, I still want to finish the cartridge.
If I have 50ml left in the cartridge and I’m in the process of fine-tuning the design of a 5ml parts, printing one or two at a time,… then design loops can be twice as long because of this behaviour. In this case, the printer will warn me despite the fact that I have more resin in the cartridge than the volume of the print, because at such a low resin level the warning appears anyway.
It would also be that I have a VAT or resin that I want to empty, and either don’t use this resin or this version. To do that without using Open Mode, I’ll have to put in an empty cartridge of the same type and thus you’ll get the warning every time for the next 100 to 150ml of print (given there’s 200-250ml in a full tank and we can’t use all of it). For this situation alone we should have the option requested in this thread.
Yes resin management is an issue for some, for various reason, but solving that alone doesn’t solve the actual problem. Also Formlabs can’t really say “to solve your issue but more resin”…
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Well, all I can offer is for you to objectively estimate what percent of Form2 users share your needs, which will help determine what priority FL should place on addressing them. I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of users are content, or at least resigned, to using the F2 the way FL says to.
This type of problem could appear only if even one unimportant issue is missed.
Wow. 2.5 years later and it’s still not fixed. My printer mis-estimated the amount of resin left in the cartridge, so now I have the exact same issue.
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