zreptil
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Apr 11, 2023 5:43 am

Filament change in UI

Hi there,

recently i stumbled over the possibility to change the filament in my Ender3 S1 Pro, when the filament run out and the sensor noticed a problem. It worked like a charme and i had a printout with two colors. This brought me to the thought that it could be a really enhancement if I could do a filament change on purpose. This worked also without a problem when i paused the printer and removed the filament. Then the printer did the filament change procedure and everything worked fine.

Then i thought, since Simplify3D seems to be one of the best (if not really the best) slicer-software out there, it should be easy to define a layer where i want to do a filament change.

I was surprised to see, that this option doesn't exist!! :o

I read through a lot of articles that had solutions for this like adding a script that inserts a M600 command in gcode at a special layer (e.g. {REPLACE "; layer 8," "M600\n; layer 8,"} inserted in the postprocessing script of the process to change the filament at layer 8).

Unfortunately this didn't work, even when i replaced M600 by M0. The printer stopped at the layer and whatever i did cancelled the print. Maybe i was not smart enough to figure out what to do when the print stopped to change the filament or the Ender3 S1 Pro is not able to handle a filament change by gcode. In the last case this feature would be problematic to work with the Ender, but I think, it should work somehow.

Anyways, my feature request would be the following:

add the possibility to initiate a filament-change at any layer. I think for the user it would be great to have this option in the preview, when he uses the sliders to walk through the layers of his print. If there were the possibility to define that at the beginning of the current top layer in the preview a filamentchange should be executed, this would be great. I know that the gcode has to be recreated after such a definition, but I think, that Simplify3D is fast enough to do this on the run.

An alternative would be to have this option in the process-settings, but then the user has to look in the preview, identify the layer, remember it, go back to the settings and define the filament change position there. This is currently anyway the case for the method with the postprocessing gcode.

I would really like to have this feature available. Currently multicolor prints are a thing of watching the print, pausing it when it could be the right layer (up to now, i didn't find the information on which layer the printer is working, neither in Simplify3D Live Preview nor in the controls of the Ender itself) and removing the filament so that the printer initiates the filament change procedure.

kind regards
Andi
S3D-Jason
Posts: 1383
Joined: Sun May 31, 2015 6:01 am

Re: Filament change in UI

Are you printing over USB or did you move the complete file to the printer SD card?

If you're printing over USB, you should be able to put a M0 wherever you want to pause and the Simplify3D Machine Control Panel will pause automatically when it reaches that point. You can then move the toolhead, change the filament, and then click Resume in the Machine Control Panel to start printing again.

If you are printing from the SD card and want to use the built-in pause functionality on the printer, you need to make sure that's supported first (only some firmwares implement it).
Nectcz
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed May 17, 2023 2:49 am

Re: Filament change in UI

Why don't you make the filament replacement function userfriendly like PrusaSlicer has? That's really missing.

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