Power outages, battery backups and resume printing

[qmaker 29]

Hi I live in the Mountains and this time of year I frequently experience power outages. I have a surge protector and am considering a battery backup to potentially give me enough time to do something.

Lately I have been doing longer and longer prints.

Anyway, I was wondering if it would be possible to have some way that the machine could recognize that the power dropped or switched to battery backup or something and either pause the print so that I can resume from the same place later, or even store some information regarding the height or layer that it was on so that I could resume from there.

I currently just measure with the calipers and setup new gCode with the model sunk into the plate wherever I left off.

Any other ideas or solutions? Maybe I am just making this too complicated and I should just print and hope the power stays on. Restart the print if needed.

[gr5 2,167]

Get tinker Marlin. It lets you resume a failed print. I think it even keeps track of the layer that you quit on but perhaps only if you do a regular abort sequence. There are many other great reasons to get tinkerMarlin and no reasons not to (there's no learning curve):

https://github.com/TinkerGnome/Ultimaker2Marlin/releases

[qmaker 29]

Thanks gr5,

I will look into that.  At first glance it seems very helpful.  Does this replace my Cura firmware on my machine? Anything I should know or be aware of specific to the Ultimaker 2 with an upgrade kit to make it a 2+

[gr5 2,167]

Cura is the slicer. Marlin is the firmware. But you do use Cura to upload a new firmware (a new marlin).

Tinker marlin is great. Just try it. There's no downside.

My printers were all working fine before the plus kit. If you want a cheaper version of the plus kit you can try my alternative (read the long description at the bottom):

http://gr5.org/store/index.php/ultimaker2-plus-upgrade-kit.html