Filament change doesnt work well

[Superlizard 0]

Hi guys,

Printing with an ender 3 s1, slicer is cura and printing via octoprint.

I wonder why, sometimes the "filament change" plugin is working great which means the printer is moving away from the printed area, and sometines it just pause the print in place without geting away from the printed area, which cause the purging process to go on the print itself. I dont get why its sometimes ok and sometimes not! any idea?

Ty in advance for your answer! and have a good print!

[Slashee_the_Cow 410]

I usually use the Pause at Height script and manually retract/purge the filament. And by that I mean once the print head parks, hold down the lever on the extruder, pull out the filament, then push in the new filament until the new colour starts coming out of the nozzle, remove that and resume. I usually use these settings:

Standby Temperature should be whatever you're printing at, or 10-15° lower if you plan to take a while to get to the printer to change (bad idea).

By default OctoPrint will block the M0 command and use its own pause, so you'll need to resume it in the OctoPrint interface. There is an option for an OctoPrint pause command, but I leave it on M0 in case I want to print directly from the printer (which makes resuming easier because you just need to push the button on the printer's control panel to resume).

 

You need to keep the motors engaged, but a lot of Ender printers don't respond to the Keep motors engaged command so I use the timeout. 3600 might throw a warning but the printer seems fine to do it. If you're not there within an hour to resume it then you've either been kidnapped, are in the back of an ambulance, fallen asleep or are just extremely forgetful.

 

For my printer (Ender-3 V3 SE) the Display Text option is mostly useless because the printer's screen doesn't show text sent to it (because Creality had to implement their own stupid GUI) but it does show up in OctoPrint's status window of what the printer should be displaying.

[Superlizard 0]

thanks a lot for your answer, do you pull and push the filament by hands? just using your fingers strength? 

Ill give it a try as soon as my last print is over! 

[Slashee_the_Cow 410]

14 hours ago, Superlizard said:

do you pull and push the filament by hands? just using your fingers strength? 

Yep! Unloading doesn't require much force. Loading goes in easily until you reach the leftover filament from the previous colour, but even then I just use the thumb of one hand to hold the lever on the extruder and with the other just grab the filament a bit away from the extruder with my thumb and index finger and push it in (repositioning my hand as required to grab more and push it in).

 

How much you're going to need to manually purge depends on colour. As a general rule, switching to lighter colours will require a bit more than dark colours. White can take a bit because it isn't replacing a colour with another colour, it's replacing a colour with nothing (essentially). Black starts coming out almost instantly.

[Superlizard 0]

thanks for all your answers!

Last thing, i tried today, weent well except for the layer, it stops at the end of the asked layer right? Previously when i used "filament change" plugin it takes in consideration the begining of the layer. Except for that it worked great, thanks a lot again!