Going to run out of filament near end of print!

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Dale Reed
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Re: Going to run out of filament near end of print!

Post by Dale Reed » Tue Aug 12, 2014 2:57 am

jdacal,

OK, good luck. Most M-codes like this can be sent in the communication tab of S3D and will be inserted in between G-codes without causing any issues whatsoever (S3D interleaves the M-codes that poll for temperature to do the trend plots, for example...), but I understand your hesitation. I'd probably be the same way unless it were a small, easily scrappable test part.

If you get your courage up, be prepared to accurately type "M84 S0" and click Send, just in case!!! If not, we'd be grateful if, after your gem prints, you try it on the idle machine and let us know if it keeps the motors from timing out. (I'm not at my machine this evening or I'd try it for you. Sorry.)

I feel for ya, bud. I have a feeling this print is NOT the one to play Josh's "Filament Roulette" on!
Dale

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jdacal
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Re: Going to run out of filament near end of print!

Post by jdacal » Tue Aug 12, 2014 3:15 am

This things big, but I had not idea it was going to take so much filament. I had already started the job when I happened to glance at S3D filament estimate. :shock: Lesson learned.

This is (or might be) what is now probably a $50 tool holder... there's just a bunch of supports in that empty compartment at the back that sucked up a lot of filament.
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ToolHolder.jpg
ToolHolder.jpg (49.9 KiB) Viewed 12666 times
jdacal

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markb
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Re: Going to run out of filament near end of print!

Post by markb » Tue Aug 12, 2014 3:16 am

There is a timeout I hit it yesterday.

But I have replaced filament in the middle of a very long print within the time out.
I stopped my print in a place where it was printing support. So when it started back up it was no big deal if it was not completely even.
I wasted a small amount of filament by doing this but saved a print I was about 8 hours into.

When you hit the pause again it starts printing very very slow don’t worry it will speed back up.

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jdacal
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Re: Going to run out of filament near end of print!

Post by jdacal » Tue Aug 12, 2014 3:21 am

But I can jog it over to the side while replacing the filament correct? It will remember where I paused it and return to that spot?
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markb
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Re: Going to run out of filament near end of print!

Post by markb » Tue Aug 12, 2014 3:27 am

It seems like you could but I just lowered it 100 then put in the new filament extracted some the raised it back 100 and unpaused the print.
This worked good and saved my print.

I am sure there are other ways to do this but this one did work.

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jdacal
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Re: Going to run out of filament near end of print!

Post by jdacal » Tue Aug 12, 2014 3:31 am

Sounds like a plan! Ok I'll try that thanks Mark.
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Re: Going to run out of filament near end of print!

Post by jdacal » Tue Aug 12, 2014 7:47 am

Failure (sort of). I didn't get the print but I was able to change the filament. Weird stuff with Octoprint after that...

First, I didn't use the code to keep the bed from dropping but will definitely program that in now, not worth the extra stress to be without it.

- Using Octoprint I hit pause in a section that was printing the first solid layer on top of a large section of supports.
- I then dropped the bed 100 (By hitting the down arrow in Octoprint)
- Cut the filament and swapped reels and ran the new blue filament through the filament guide.
- I hit retract at this point to get the old piece of filament out.
- I inserted filament into extruder and hit retract by mistake (duh!)
- I then placed paper plate on top of print and hit extrude 100. Repeated this 2 more times for a total of 300.
- I hit the up arrow in Octoprint to raise the bed 100. The bed went down and bottomed out and started ratcheting noises in the stepper motor.
- I hit the up arrow again in case I had messed up and hit the wrong arrow. Same thing, had to sit through 100 of ratcheting noises.
- At this point I'm assuming its lost track of its position so I hit the DOWN arrow and it goes up about half way to the print. Not wanting to crash the print into the extruder I then begin to raise it by 10 and finally by 1 until its were it should be (gauging by eyesight)
- I hit resume and it starts printing REALLY slow. (The height indicator in Octoprint has lost the original height which I think was around 38 and now its showing the extruder at -1mm. Adding 1mm would leave way to big a gap so I'm sticking by my eyeball estimate. Meanwhile in the G-Code section of Octoprint it still shows the correct height for the print. So right now I'm just waiting to see if the printer will resume normal speed and if any damage is caused should the extruder be off by 1mm. I was told it would be slow, but I'm not sure if it needs to finish the current pattern it is working on, which is a long one, before it speeds up again. It's layed about 40 lines of blue filament very slowly and very thin, so I hope that corrects itself once (if) it goes back to normal speed.
- Oh well, guess what, after a bunch of slow lines, it gets to the end of a line and just stops. I was watching it on video. By the time I walked to the printer the bed had dropped. Octoprint still showed status as printing in the control tab but the gcode tab was not updating anything. So one tab showed printing the other showed not printing.

I'm not sure if there are printer specific settings that I need to set into Octoprint. But it looks like at the default settings it prints fine, but at least in my case it didn't handle the filament change very well.

These two pictures show what the Control and Gcode tabs in Octoprint showed after hitting resume print:
2014-08-12 01.18.10_1.jpg
Machine State in Octoprint from the Control tab
2014-08-12 01.18.10_1.jpg (270.7 KiB) Viewed 12649 times
2014-08-12 01.20.11_1.jpg
Information showing in Octoprint G-Code tab after hitting resume print.
2014-08-12 01.20.11_1.jpg (185.3 KiB) Viewed 12649 times
And these two pictures show the actual lines layed down with the new blue filament reel. They were printed at a snail's pace and very thin, even though I had extruded 300 of healthy looking filament before hitting resume print. When it finally got to the end of the left-most blue line it just suddenly stopped printing, even though Octoprint showed still printing.
2014-08-12 01.56.47_1.jpg
2014-08-12 01.56.47_1.jpg (208.07 KiB) Viewed 12649 times
2014-08-12 01.59.42_1.jpg
2014-08-12 01.59.42_1.jpg (300.03 KiB) Viewed 12649 times
Lessons learned:

- Add the proper codes to S3D to keep bed from dropping
- Buy a bigger reel of filament
- Makergear owners are very helpful! Thanks everybody for your support and tips.
- Octoprint works fantastic for printing wirelessly. But I need to find out if me or the software has some issues with the reel change. I think hitting the up arrow twice and having it head down points to a problem either in my configuration or possibly a software issue. Not sure which at this point.

Oh, one more thing I just remembered. My Viki LCD showed the Z at around -2.3 when the bed went down.
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jsc
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Re: Going to run out of filament near end of print!

Post by jsc » Tue Aug 12, 2014 3:12 pm

Remember, positive Z means the nozzle moves UP in relation to the bed, so the *bed moves DOWN*.

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jdacal
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Re: Going to run out of filament near end of print!

Post by jdacal » Tue Aug 12, 2014 3:23 pm

jsc wrote:Remember, positive Z means the nozzle moves UP in relation to the bed, so the *bed moves DOWN*.
That makes sense. But I hit the down arrow to move it down initially. I'll double check later today just to make sure I didn't imagine it.
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jdacal
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Re: Going to run out of filament near end of print!

Post by jdacal » Thu Aug 14, 2014 5:33 am

Well my Raspberry Pi died on me. Intermittent boots, so I can't check Octopi for now. Returning it to Amazon. On the bright side I didn't know there was a Raspberry Pi B+, I had ordered the B model. So looking forward to that. Also if anyone is on the market for one, I found it about $25 dollars cheaper at NewEgg than at Amazon.
jdacal

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