Are there printers that have some sort of built in error detection?
I'm not technical enough to know the plausibility, but some seemingly reasonable cases would be:
- detect that filament is no longer extruding and Printing Air has begun
- detect massive buildup of plastic around filament
- detect that part has come dislodged from build platform
Then an error is detected, the print is paused, and a human is summoned
9 years, 4 months ago
These printers currently have a 6 week lead time and are available exclusively through our Printer Farm service. Feel free to message me for more details.
Far as printing air is concerned, you could run the printer power supply through a microswitch that's held closed by the filament. It would kill the print as soon as the filament ran out but I don't see an easy way to pause the print. My printer isn't open-source so I'm not totally familiar with RAMPS etc boards. There may be a "Pause" input pin, which could help.
Detecting if the work has become detached from the build plate presents more of a challenge and to be honest, I can't think of a way that doesn't involve cameras and something like a Raspberry Pi running some kinda bespoke image analysis software. Probably easier just to run a webcam and periodically check progress. Yeah. Not ideal but that's one heck of an ask.
Not sure what you mean but "buildup of plastic around filament". You mean buildup of molten plastic around the tip of the hot-end? TBH, I've never experienced that as a serious issue. Just check before each print and de-gunk the tip every 25 hours or so of run time. Might be an idea to make sure the tip is good and flat with a very small radius around the outer edge.
A while ago, I toyed with the idea of designing a doohickey that would detect all manner of errors and could be fitted to any FDM printer. TBH, I ran out of steam trying to do it alone. Anyone fancies warming the concept over, bung me a howdy. :-)
Cheers!
Andy
@kstichno : didn't realize new mb's had this. i wonder if they work as well (read: not well) as the rest of the machine!
@elpulpo : i think your doohickey is a great idea. Also, "bung me a howdy" is the best phrase I've heard all month!
http://sd3dprinting.com/abe-adaptive-build-environment/
We have developed that further and have come out with two cloud based printing platforms which we call "3D Genie" (dual, air cooled) and "Jarvis" (quad, liquid cooled). These printers include all the ABE tech plus additional cloud based automation including auto-ejection of prints, multi-week print queues and print QA verification systems. You will have to message me if you want more information on these systems as we are currently only offering access to them through a cloud based 3D printing hosting solution which we call The Printer Farm:
http://3dprint.com/5198/sd3d-3d-printer-farms-abe/
http://www.fabbaloo.com/blog/2014/6/1/a-printer-farm-for-your-3d-printer