Read/Write NFC Tags

[JTMD 20]

i'd love to make my own tags, but for someone unknown reason, spoolmaker.exe simply wont run..  no indication whats wrong, I just double click it and nothing..

 

[Monroe07 8]

Through troubleshooting with you, It has been discovered that while you are using the most recent version of Cura (v5.3.0), Spoolmaker still requires something (or things) from Cura v5.0.0, or at least some other version of Cura earlier than v5.3.0. I've submitted an issue ticket on GitHub for the issue.

[olivmath 1]

On 4/14/2023 at 7:36 PM, Monroe07 said:

Through troubleshooting with you, It has been discovered that while you are using the most recent version of Cura (v5.3.0), Spoolmaker still requires something (or things) from Cura v5.0.0, or at least some other version of Cura earlier than v5.3.0. I've submitted an issue ticket on GitHub for the issue.

 

Monroe is right, I had 5.3.0 and 5.2.1 version installed and nothing was opening/showing when clicking...

I just installed the 5.0.0 version and still not working, but at least I have an error window:

[TheEngineerable 0]

@Monroe07. How has the material station clone project gone? Do you have pictures of it?

[JDRivera 1]

On 1/5/2023 at 9:13 AM, dainon said:

I use the S5 as a hobby; if someone's use case is similar to mine (i.e., small set of spools/colors), you can try this location for NFC tags and re-write to them when you replace a spool.

 

I 3D modeled an NFC tag holder (26mm square and staple shaped), then printed it in each filament. I attached the NFC tag (written per filament brand/type/color, using all the great information from this thread) to the inside left side of the material station bays. In this location, the NFC tags are recognized and updated. This works for all but the left most bay as it has a side wall there. For me, I used that bay for Ultimaker Breakaway filament, so it's not an issue.

Hey @dainon, I don't suppose you have a link (Amazon or otherwise) to the tags you used that you'd be willing to share. I've used a few different I've seen on Amazon and none of them seem to have worked for me. What's more the previously mentioned tags in the thread are no longer available on Amazon😕

[rachael7 73]

These are the ones I bought most recently. They work fine as long as the spool is rotated to place the tag within the antenna. https://nfctagify.com/collections/stock-nfc-stickers/products/clear-nfc-stickers?variant=45259880857894

[JDRivera 1]

On 9/14/2023 at 1:02 PM, rachael7 said:

These are the ones I bought most recently. They work fine as long as the spool is rotated to place the tag within the antenna. https://nfctagify.com/collections/stock-nfc-stickers/products/clear-nfc-stickers?variant=45259880857894

I'll give these a try, thanks!

[alkekmakerspace 1]

On 11/11/2022 at 5:11 PM, rachael7 said:

There is the full weight, which lives in data register 2E, the remaining weight, which lives in register 2F, and the elapsed printing time in seconds (it's shown in hours in the GUI, but stored in seconds), which uses the first three bytes of register 31.

 

If you used the GUI to make the tag, and after writing, it is showing the same weight for total, remaining, and "new", along with 0.0 for the printing time, you should be correctly set up as a fresh roll.  The GUI doesn't let you change the remaining weight or the printing time, only the "new" weight number, so if you want to make it a partial roll, you can make the tag with SpoolMaker, then manually edit the data registers using nfctoolsgui or something similar.

 

Here's what mine looks like after making a tag for one of my materials:

 

The work done to create this is amazing. I personally manage a MakerSpace at Texas State University and have been using this to rewrite our old Ultimaker Tags and put them on 3rd party filament. We have (8) Ultimaker S5s with Material Stations and send prints from 5 different PCs. Since most of the people using our printers are new users, it is super helpful for them to just be able to pick the material they want thats already loaded on the printer within Cura. We have also started to recycle our waste material back into filament using a Filabot setup. When we are busy, we typically go through 6 spools a week. Our busiest month was 26k grams of filament.

I am now looking into ways write the total weight and remaining weight through the GUI. @Bunnyman21 what would it take to include that functionality in this GUI?

[NTwoO 5]

I forked the Spoolmaker and added a few features to the tool:

 

1: The materials list is sorted alphabetically

2: The label in custom materials is added in the name

3: There is a filter added to filter the list. The filter is smart case. If you add an upper case, the search is case sensitive, otherwise it is case insensitive

 

https://github.com/fmgrotepass/Spool-Maker

 

The pull request was submitted to add this to the main version 

Edited January 30 by NTwoO

[mbhsict 6]

I'm getting the error below, any workaround?

Have Cura 5.6 and 5.0 installed

 

Edit: Have tried manually starting the few 'Smart Card' windows services without any resolution

 

Edited March 22 by mbhsict
updated information

[NTwoO 5]

Your problem looks like an issue with finding the card reader. Can you check your card reader with another application? Check windows device manager to see if your card reader is present.

 

I didn't see your problem, but when I ran the Spoolmaker I ran into another issue with a directory called .sentry-native that was placed in the user configuration folder. If people run into this with the beta version of Cura 5.7, then this should fix it. Note, it is fixed in my fork and not in the original code linked up top in this thread.

 

[mbhsict 6]

I'm using an Elatec TWN4, and it works with the Director software it comes with. I can read the tags to some degree, just not sure of which pages etc to look at for the material remaining. Was hoping the SpoolMaker program would make it a lot easier.

I am reporting on how much material is remaining in our Material Stations to save treking around campus all the time for replacement material. I have found that the amount remaining is not very accurate so would like to weigh it, update it and see if if the values drift.

[rachael7 73]

2 hours ago, mbhsict said:

I'm using an Elatec TWN4, and it works with the Director software it comes with. I can read the tags to some degree, just not sure of which pages etc to look at for the material remaining. Was hoping the SpoolMaker program would make it a lot easier.

 

I'm not sure if Spoolmaker will be the right tool for that, but if you're able to read the registers, you can get the values directly and modify them if you wish. Here are the ones I know about, with the memory address followed by the parameter:

 

2E: Total spool weight
2F: Remaining spool weight
31: Printing time (in seconds). Only uses first three bytes, leave 4th byte alone.

 

The data is stored in hexadecimal, with the weights in grams, if I recall correctly.  It might be milligrams, but it's some multiple of grams, anyway.  Hope this helps!

[mbhsict 6]

thanks, I've taken some readings and found below.

 

New full spool - NFC reads 750000

New full spool - scale weight 1019g

Empty spool - scale weight - 229g

 

That leaves 790g of material, yet the tag is programmed with 750g of material.

Is this an extra 40g that can't be printed because of the length to feed up the bowden tubes?

 

I'll measure a few more semi-used spools and compare scale weights to nfc readings and see if there if the 40g difference is consistent.

On more than one occurrence, we have had the printers say material is empty, when there looks to be quire a few loops of the spool left.

[rachael7 73]

9 minutes ago, mbhsict said:

Is this an extra 40g that can't be printed because of the length to feed up the bowden tubes?

 

I'll measure a few more semi-used spools and compare scale weights to nfc readings and see if there if the 40g difference is consistent.

On more than one occurrence, we have had the printers say material is empty, when there looks to be quire a few loops of the spool left.

 

It takes well over a meter of filament to get from the spool in the Material Station to the print head, maybe even more than 1.5m, which amounts to more than a few wraps left on the spool at the end. One might hope or expect that it would just keep pulling the filament in until it actually ran out at the print head, but it does not. As soon as the tail end of the filament passes the sensor at the entry point, the machine considers the material empty and whatever is inside the machine gets pushed back and usually coils back around the spool. I don't know if the amount left in the machine comes out to 40g, but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable number. I doubt they deliberately put extra on the roll for that purpose though, particularly since you could be using the filament from the back spool holder (which has a much shorter path) or on another machine like a 2+. More likely, in a high speed filament production line, it is just easier to err a little on the heavy side, rather than risk shorting a customer and facing a complaint or regulatory action.

Edited March 28 by rachael7

[mbhsict 6]

The material remaining on the spool tag is only read for display purposes then I guess. If there is an end of roll sensor in the material station, the remaining field on the tag could be whatever you like, its only going to affect the display bar.

As it is now I have a printer which when queried via the api is showing remaining amount of 0 yet is happily printing away.
I guess the empty flag gets set when the end sensor is tripped.

 

{ "slot_index": 2, "material_guid": "44a029e6-e31b-4c9e-a12f-9282e29a92ff", "direction": 0, "material_selection_source": "RFID", "material_insertion_datetime": "2024-03-25T00:41:23", "status": "loaded", "material_empty": 0, "material_remaining": 0, "material_remaining_mm": 0 },

 

Kind of makes it hard to try and report when machines are empty.

[rachael7 73]

I didn't even know there was a material empty tag. The machine definitely does not use the amount remaining on the spool in any functional way. What it has is a sensor just inside the hole where you poke the filament into the material station. When the material is pushed in, it trips the sensor and the machine reads the tag to see what you just stuck in it. As the print is running, if that sensor trips back the other way, that means the tail of the roll just passed the sensor, so the machine takes that as empty and does the unload cycle on the remaining filament. The inside of the material station is such that if the machine kept printing past that point, the material could get stuck in there, so that's why it won't print the last meter or two of filament.

[mbhsict 6]

yep understand all that, perhaps I should use the material empty flag on the api as the trigger for my alert email.

The printers will sit there for days until someone tells us that it is out of material, if thats mid print it can be an issue.

I have a dashboard that shows us the amount remaining on all the slots across the fleet of printers, but without an accurate measure on the tag, its not very reliable.

[rachael7 73]

I agree, that API flag is likely your best bet for an alert on filament directly. Do you also have an alert for the printer status? There is a parameter exposed to the API that will tell you if a printer is stopped mid-print, such as when filament runs out. That seems like a worthwhile alert trigger as well, particularly since it would also catch other issues that require operator intervention. 

[3dprntz 4]

How do you have the API alert you of these triggers or that there was a problem with the filament?

[mbhsict 6]

On 3/29/2024 at 1:39 AM, 3dprntz said:

How do you have the API alert you of these triggers or that there was a problem with the filament?

I'm using Grafana to log data from the local API, best suited to v7 firmware.

I can then graph and alert on errors, supply levels, hours remaining on filters etc

[NTwoO 5]

The SpoolMaker application is extended with a drop down box providing the found diameters. It is possible to use this to filter the selected materials. Again this is in my fork.

 

There are a number of filaments with 1.74 and 1.75 diameter in the standard Cura database. There are also 2.8 and 3.175 diameters. The default is 2.85 as this is the most used diameter for the Ultimaker and programming the spools used on the UM printers. It is also possible to select "All" to have no filter.

 

For NFC tags I've seen that these NFC 216 tags on Aliexpress work with spools having a 51mm center hole. The NFC reader in the printer is capable of working with these. Some of my spools of other manufacturers also have center holes of 60+mm and with these the tag is not read properly when it is at the bottom.

Edited April 21 by NTwoO
Added info of NFC tags working.