Wanhao Direct Print

[cncpadawan]

Hello!

I have a Wanhao Duplicator 4, and decided (while calibrating the printer) to save some time and direct print to the printer instead of pulling the SD card out all the time. It started off ok, started heating the extruder and all of that.. but once it made it to temp it never proceeded to print. S3D showed it was still in a preheat stage, and the LCD on the printer just said temp with the temp value.

Has anyone had experience with the Duplicator 4 and direct printing? Did it work for you? Note I am using a FlashForge Creator Pro profile per instructions from S3D support for another issue, and I am running sailfish 7.7 firmware at the moment.

[Rebekah_harper]

Hiya,

I print directly to the printer and not had any problems as such.

The only thing I had was that it would reach the required temperature. I removed the fan which was always on and it's been fine since.

[cncpadawan]

Hmm... ok, I will give it another shot and see what I get as I do my testing. Thanks!

[cncpadawan]

No go... it says it is preheating the bed (which, it shouldn't be since the bed temp is set to 0). The temp on the LCD shows none of them increasing. It is communicating with the printer though, because it is giving me live temp feedback and everything.. just doesn't do anything other than sit there showing temp 1% and the temperature values.

[cncpadawan]

Correction, it is working now. I had shut off the heated bed in firmware. Turning it on wasn't enough, I had to power cycle the printer. It was trying to heat a bed that it thought it had, even though it didn't have one. Enabled it, power cycled the printer, and away it goes... Wheee!

[cncpadawan]

UGH! It worked once.. only after freshly starting the printer. Now, it won't work at all. Gets the temp to range, but then never moves forward from there.

[habloIngles]

If you're not going to use the heated bed (i.e. set it to 0) try going to the scripts and removing these two lines from the starting g-code:
M140 S[bed0_temperature] T0
M134 T0 ; stabilize bed temperature

see if that works for you

[Rebekah_harper]

Try using the Wanhao profile to see what happens.

Also if you haven't, re boot the computer, switch on the printer, start S3D and open the manual control panel.

Under communication you can see if it's happy.

[JoeJ]

Just so you know, they have 3 different profiles for both the FF Creator Pro and the Wanhao Duplicator 4. One is for the right extruder only, another for left extruder only, and then one for prints that will be using both extruders. This is really nice since S3D took care of all the work for creating custom preheating and scripts for each scenario.

However, be sure that you do NOT select the (both extruders) profile and then disable one of the extruders by setting the temperature to zero. That won't work since the starting scripts for that profile are written for scenarios where you will be heating both extruders. If you only want to use one extruder, make sure you select the appropriate (right extruder) or (left extruder) profile.

[cncpadawan]

Thank you for the advice all, I will give it a shot! As far as the profile though, I am using the FlashForge Creator Pro per recommendation from S3D support. The others have the wrong bed size, they are short in X and Y by 5mm and I needed that 5mm for the print I am doing.

I am indeed using the right profile. I haven't re-aligned the left extruder yet but I have noticed those others. Thanks for the reminder!