Hi, I work for a makerspace and we have a Form2 that’s failing prints and doing poorly on the optics test despite thorough cleaning of all optics and whatnot, according to Formlabs procedure. I sent pictures and logs to Formlabs support and they gave me the expected answer of ‘It’s broken, buy our new one’ basically. However what I found strange was the part of the printer that they said was broken. They said:
“The optics are actually in a pretty good place. The test print only has minor flaring on the pillars and the diagnostics indicate they laser power is strong. The more concerning problem is that one of the printer’s centroids is damaged. There are four centroids in the printer that measure and adjust the laser position to correct for inaccuracies. The diagnostics show that one of these is damaged so the printer will not be accurate.”
What has me really confused is that I’ve never heard of a part in these machines called a “centroid”, let alone one that can fail. I looked around and can find literally no mention of this issue on the internet.
Has anyone else had this issue? Does anyone know what the heck a “centroid” is outside of geometry?
Any help, much appreciated.
~Farcee (They/She)
So, update on this.
I squeezed a little more information out of Formlabs sales te- I mean technical support team.
This very vague information combined with some digging lead me to this blog post by Bunnie Huang. If you scroll down far enough, you’ll find where Bunnie mentions a u-shaped board with some photosensors on it. I suspect those 4 photosensors are the parts that Formlabs is referring to as “Centroids”.
This part looks rather replaceable with lots of teardown work. That being said, the person helping me from Formlabs said that this part requires calibration that can’t be done outside of the factory manufacturing process. I am sure that they have put some sort of barrier to calibrating this yourself, but it does make me wonder what the results would be if I got a new board entirely and replaced the whole part. If no other solution results other than trashing the thing, I don’t see the harm in attempting this.
Just depends on if I can get my hands on a replacement board.
~Farcee (They/She)