MakerGear Forum

I can't claim credit for the concept, I saw this Clock on Reddit the other day and I was inspired to try and design my own. It's a pretty unique concept, you read the time off the little window to the left.

The five basic parts.

It runs off a normal (high torque) clock movement.

The hour Dial... The print was paused when it got to the numbers layer and the filament changed to get the black numbers. This was the first time I tried this in S3D, turns out it's pretty easy to do.
The minutes dial.

That turned out great! Love the color change effect too - I generally only pause S3D when my print is cratering - glad to know it can be used for something useful as well!

Did you pause it manually in S3D or send a series of commands? I read a thread some time ago that you are able to pause, move the printhead and setup the new filament and then resume and it would move back to the last print position and restart. Is that the method you used?

Yeah... I click pause and then using the jog buttons (have that tab open before you hit pause) click the z axis as quick as you can to drop the platform. If you are not quick to drop the platform the hot nozzle can melt the spot it stops at and leave a blob. This happened the first few times I tried it but I just sliced it off the blob with a razor blade. Then hit retract and after the filament change you extrude a bit to get it flowing and then just hit resume and it goes right back to where it left off. Just make sure you click in the right order - Pause, Drop Z, then Retract. I got excited and hit retract first once after the pause and I couldn't drop the platform until it stopped retracting, and of course I hit 100 too. Overall it's pretty easy and opens up some new design possibilities. (as long as the design layers work out like for this.)

-Steve

If you are handy with a text editor, you can add in some gcode at the appropriate layer so you don't need to hit pause at the exact right moment and do all that stuff manually. Simplify3D and OctoPrint both use M0 to indicate a pause. So you can search through the file to find the layer you want to pause at, and insert

jsc wrote:If you are handy with a text editor, you can add in some gcode at the appropriate layer so you don't need to hit pause at the exact right moment and do all that stuff manually. Simplify3D and OctoPrint both use M0 to indicate a pause. So you can search through the file to find the layer you want to pause at, and insert

Code: Select all

M0 ; pause
G91 ; set relative positioning
G0 Z 20 ; raise Z (drop bed)
G1 E-10 ; retract
G90 ; set absolute positioning
M84 S0 ; disable idle timeout

Jin, would you then just Resume using the Machine Control Panel button in S3D when you are done with the filament swap?

Presumably. I haven't played too much with filament swapping. M0 is treated exactly as if you had pushed the pause button manually. The rest of the code is to automate some of the things you want to have happen when a print is paused.

Excellent!

That would be a lot easier instead of sitting there having to watch it print I'll have to give this a try next time. Thanks

-Steve

If you do try it out, make sure you don't put a space between Z and 20. I think that's a syntax error.