On thing I would love to see in the software (I’m using Pronterface) of the future is to be able to “back up.” Sometimes I have a print fail due to the plastic no longer depositing right, or some other malfunction. It would be nice if I didn’t have to toss the piece, but instead could hit the “emergency” button and then tell the machine to begin stepping backward until I told it to begin again.
I’m not specifically saying it has to retrace all previous steps for each layer. Just being able to go back down the Z axis until it was close would be great. It would know what layer to start printing again by how much I had allowed it to reverse, and we’d hope that the 1/2 finished layer was “close enough” to not cause a problem.
This is called “Pause” and should involve the head to go up and to cool down but not the bed to cool down until resumed.
No, I’ve used Pause quite a bit, it works fine. The problem is when the printer has done several layers without the problem being detected (I’m out of the room, etc.) I need to be able to go back to previous layers and print from there on. Even just pausing, readjusting the print height, and continuing wouldn’t work on most prints because now you’ve got a number of layers halfway through that were essentially “skipped.”
I see
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Usually it was too much work to take the g-code, copy the header, search for the first occurence of the correct Z and remove all before that including homing.
Interesting work around. I’ll have to try that next time. Anyway, it’d be nice to see that built into future versions.
It’s much work, error prone and doesn’t work well with the tower plugin of Skeinforge.
MACH3 for subtractive CNC mills has this nice “run from here” command. Could use something like this.