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Pause print?

oneaday

oneaday

Member
#1
#1
Hi!

I have two Prusa MK2 and tomorrow I'll get my gMax :D I live in my apartment with wife and kids and some days I cant print 24/7, my wife doesn't like the sound of the printers while she's practicing her yoga for example.

Are there anyone out there who's successfully have paused a print at evening for example and resuming it the next morning? I'm using OctoPrint for my current printers and I've managed to pause/resume a print through octopi with some smart gCodes "at pause" and "at resume". It retracts 10mm and move to home, when resuming it extrudes 10mm and return to the last same coordinates it was paused at. It seems to work for a 10 min pause, but it doesn't turn the heat bed off or the nozzle heat / nozzle fan. I'm sure it can be made with some more tweaking of gCodes, but when I get my gMax I will be pretty forced to be able to pause/resume the prints. Before we ordered the gMax we looked at some industrial grade printers which had these functions.

Has anyone experienced anything with this? Maybe its built into the gMax Firmware? :)
 
R

Roxy

New Member
#2
#2
I pause difficult prints very often at night. For example, this print takes 20 hours and I don't dare leave it run at night:

http://i1378.photobucket.com/albums/ah9 ... sddaq9.jpg

I typically use PronterFace, but this can be done from the LCD Panel also.

I pause the print while the printer is doing in-fill on a layer.

I raise the nozzle 15mm or 20mm

I turn off the nozzle's heater (But I leave the heat bed on!!!)

I go to sleep for the night.

In the morning I turn on the nozzle.

After 3 or 4 minutes, I purge 5mm or 10mm of filament through the nozzle.

I tell the print to 'Resume'

Pretty much, that always works for me!
 
D

DForbes

New Member
#3
#3
oneaday said:
Hi!

I have two Prusa MK2 and tomorrow I'll get my gMax :D I live in my apartment with wife and kids and some days I cant print 24/7, my wife doesn't like the sound of the printers while she's practicing her yoga for example.

Are there anyone out there who's successfully have paused a print at evening for example and resuming it the next morning? I'm using OctoPrint for my current printers and I've managed to pause/resume a print through octopi with some smart gCodes "at pause" and "at resume". It retracts 10mm and move to home, when resuming it extrudes 10mm and return to the last same coordinates it was paused at. It seems to work for a 10 min pause, but it doesn't turn the heat bed off or the nozzle heat / nozzle fan. I'm sure it can be made with some more tweaking of gCodes, but when I get my gMax I will be pretty forced to be able to pause/resume the prints. Before we ordered the gMax we looked at some industrial grade printers which had these functions.

Has anyone experienced anything with this? Maybe its built into the gMax Firmware? :)
Click to expand...

I tried this on my XT1.5+ but I noticed the motors do shut off after a few minutes so if X or Y drift or you bump the axis you are screwed? After re-starting my print I noticed the layers are off, of course by an extremely small amount but you can still see it in the layers. Why can't the motors be left on so nothing moves?

Dennis
 
R

Roxy

New Member
#4
#4
DForbes said:
I tried this on my XT1.5+ but I noticed the motors do shut off after a few minutes so if X or Y drift or you bump the axis you are screwed? After re-starting my print I noticed the layers are off, of course by an extremely small amount but you can still see it in the layers. Why can't the motors be left on so nothing moves?
Click to expand...
Yes! I forgot to mention this in my post up above. You need to configure your Marlin firmware on the printer to hold the motors in position when you pause your print. This can be done in the Configuration_adv.h:

Code: 
// Default stepper release if idle. Set to 0 to deactivate.
// Steppers will shut down DEFAULT_STEPPER_DEACTIVE_TIME seconds after the last move when DISABLE_INACTIVE_? is true.
// Time can be set by M18 and M84.
#define DEFAULT_STEPPER_DEACTIVE_TIME 120
#define DISABLE_INACTIVE_X true
#define DISABLE_INACTIVE_Y true
#define DISABLE_INACTIVE_Z true  // set to false if the nozzle will fall down on your printed part when print has finished.
#define DISABLE_INACTIVE_E true
If you set the DISABLE_INACTIVE_? to false (or set DEFAULT_STEPPER_DEACTIVE_TIME to 0) the motors will stay locked in position. Alternatively, you can change the 120 (from 2 minutes) to 32400 for 9 hours of sleep before the motors turn off. ( 9 * 60 * 60 = 32400 )
 
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