Do you print unattended: overnight or away?

Now that I have my 3d printer working reasonably well and I've done a couple 3 hour prints with no problem, I want to go bigger (aka longer prints). The problem is that I work 7:30-5:30 daily and don't get much time to print except for the 3 hours after dinner.

I'm not sure about leaving the printer "unattended". I was wondering what the opinions are on the topic?

Thanks,

There have been several threads on this topic. The general consensus is that you simply don't have a choice. Nobody has the time to babysit a 22 hour long print. Even 8 or 12 hour long prints are pretty impractical.

For me filament feed seems to be the main gotcha on long prints. A random snarl here or there / filament catches on something / print it toast.

You must trust your machines. If they don't work, fix the problem and trust them next time. If you don't trust your machines, they will know it and will never do what you want. (I'm figuring if it's true for cars, it likely applies to printers as well)

I am building a machine with 50 micron resolution (target) and a 3.5 cubic foot build envelope. I do not think I'll get many chances to watch any but the smallest prints. I am incorporating a number of features that will allow me to check status at a glance, however.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/27/2013 11:12PM by Maxx Mayhem.

I've ran prints running up near 100+ hours on my machine without failure during the print.

no problems here...

Put it somewhere it can't burn down your house! A webcam to check in on it would be handy. You can remote in and cancel or start a job.

+1 on the webcam, very, very handy along with Logmein or something similar if a problem.

Plus, don't your really want to know how's it's going anyhow when you're away? :-)

But exactly as they said, do a good pre-flight before starting it and make sure its reliable first.

My two cents...

Yup my printer is at work so I often leave it printing when I've finished for the day.

Have also done 48+ hour prints.

Ben

Unattended printing is pretty well a given. In looking at monitoring options, I've been considering a few possibilities. One of the big ones I want to work on, is a web-based status page. Since a lot of what I've seen involves custom source code, adding elements shouldn't be *that* difficult (he says laughingly).

In all seriousness, though, I've been thinking about strapping a Raspberry Pi to the USB on an Arduino. It can't provide enough power to drive the electronics, but I was going to try to set it up as a web host. Design items on my workstation, then upload to a holding folder on the RasPi. From there, set up the RasPi to load the files into the printer, and possiblly monitor percent completion, or look for errors (somehow). Add an optical or sonic sensor to the feeder, to watch for "Filament Out," maybe even set up a spool sensor to give a "Filament Low." Give the system a chance to find a place to make a controlled pause/stop for reload. Statuses could be loaded into a web page using Python, and eihter uploaded to a website, or even an internal web server.

It would be extra electronics for sensors, and a lot of extra code, but I think it would be very possible to build a nice moniotring system.

Quote
Dirty Steve
I've ran prints running up near 100+ hours on my machine without failure during the print.

100 hour print? Were you printing at 1mm/s?

10mm/s, (XY ripples at higher speeds) currently printing a 1 meter tall human skeleton. 0.25mm nozzle, 0.1mm layers, 50% infill, with support. Adds up quickly with my nozzle size and layer heights.

Cutting mat is marked in inches in photos.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/29/2013 11:19PM by Dirty Steve.

Pretty cool prints. Gotta get yourself a delta, print a full size model and probably just as fast as 50% scale

sweet skeleton. Are the 3D-files available?

I'm still planning to move my ethernet webcam over to the corner of the garage where my Prusa i3 resides... Sometimes even when I'm at home I would like to be able to keep an eye on it (say, when reading or watching TV elsewhere in the house).

My only problems with unattended printing came with some of my "train wrecks" when I didn't have good adhesion on my ABS prints (which turned out to be uneven levelling on the Y axis).

Usually this simply resulted in a bird's nest but on one occasion I had a tall piece get knocked off the bed where it jammed the Y axis movement. Fortunately no stepper motors or electronics were injured.

One thing I've found useful (since I take my laptop with me to work every day) for long print jobs is that I can upload a print job to the SD card relatively quickly, then disconnect and start from the printer LCD menu. That's a useful option if you're so equipped. It would still be nice to have a queueing feature as mentioned above even if I had to manually confirm the next job is ready, but I could also do that in software on the host PC.

@stahlsau

It is a purchased model, that I can't post the files for.

I run OctoPrint on the Raspberry Pi on both my mendels, this gives you web accessible monitoring and even a webcam feed.

Ben

Yes, I did. But the first time I forgot that my laptop went into screensaver modus, so the print stopped.
Now I ether print it form the SD card, or let the laptop run without screensaver modus.

Good luck.

I run a raspberrypi with octoprint. I mounted a web cam to my mendel and have full web control. I use a ip cam app on my phone to check in. Just make sure you have password protection for octoprint... I need a pw for octoprint, pw to access the proxy and have the web dir pw protected. Overkill maybe... but when you figure this thing could burn down the house I'd say cheap insurance. And I also mine bitcoin with the raspberrypi probably the first stand alone printer setup that makes money while sitting idle. You can see it at [www.crapshack.net]