Air managers fail at low bed temperatures

[Gero 54]

We have finally found the reason why the S5 Probundle occasionally stops printing without error. 

In the case of the observed print abort, the print head stops abruptly and the print bed moves downwards. No other functions are triggered!
No retraction of the filament, no pause function and therefore no possibility to continue printing. 

 

While we were able to observe an error message on the display with previous Air Manager discontinuations, there were now several cases where the display remained completely black and thus no error message was available. 

 

With such interruptions, we rather suspected the material station as the cause. Now, however, we can say with great certainty that it is due to the Air Manager. At temperatures of 45°C or lower, the fan seems to run so slowly that the monitoring of whether the fan is running tends to drop out. Unfortunately, the firmware seems to have the questionable setting of immediately cancelling the printout without the possibility of a continuation when a short interruption of the fan is measured. 

 

Since all materials have been printed on the print bed at temperatures above 45°C, this was hardly noticeable. 
Now, however, the Ultimaker Nylon is set to 40°C as standard. 
This resulted in an increased number of aborts and some wasted filament. 

 

I would clearly call this a bug. 
The fact that the print is interrupted should also be improved. At least the fact that aborts cannot be resumed for the reason described seems unnecessary, as aborts can also be continued with other errors. 

[Dustin 129]

Hi Gero,
That does indeed sound like a bug.
Can you share what firmware version number you are running?

Additionally, I recommend you report this directly to UltiMaker Support so they can collect more information from you about this issue? 

• I would recommend you export your machine log files (preferably shortly after this sort of issue triggers) as this will be the first thing they ask you for.
  Guide here: https://support.makerbot.com/s/article/1667337561393
• Submit a support case here: https://support.makerbot.com/s/contactsupport