Stopping and resuming a print

[Jtp 1]

Hi All,

I'm in the slightly irritating situation where the practice manager of the office where I have our Ultimaker2 printer has stipulated that we cannot print over night, or in situations where the printer is unattended (there must be someone responsible for the print in the building). This is mostly due to the risk of fire, but also due to the risk of someone being burnt by the hot elements. The risk of burning has been solved by putting a large sign up that says not to touch when in use, but the risk of fire is still to be resolved.

This has led me to look at a number of solutions to the problem of print that will take longer that hours when it can be attended: First that we could build a ventilated (passive) over-case that would prevent anything from falling into the top of the Ultimaker2, accompanied by a door for the front to protect from anything getting in that way, thus making the printer safer to leave unattended; Second that we could stop a print when we needed to leave, and resume the print when we returned.

The question I have is: Is it possible to stop a print, power down the printer, and resume the print job the next day?

I hope some of the community can shed some light on the ideas above and help solve this problem that I have.

Cheers,

Bill

[SandervG 1,521]

Hi Bill,

Basically you have a similar chance of having a fire as with a lot of other electronic devices (which is very low!) It is CE approved. Depending on what you will be making there are a lot of shapes/complexities that exceed the 8 hour work-day. For that reason it has to be safe!

Obviously, your practice manager has the right to create the guidelines he finds appropriate. It is an option to pause a print, but I would not recommend to do this overnight, and continue in the morning.

At this stage it is not possible to mark the gcode, and power off.

You could do it manually, but it would require a lot of manual work and a high fail rate.

It is always possible someone has a very clever and creative work around, but this is to my knowledge.

Good luck!

[DidierKlein 729]

Biggest problem if you want to pause a print and resume a couple of hours after is that either you need to leave the printer on (which doesn't solve your problem).

The heated bed has to stay at temp or the print will pop off when you try to resume. And you have to manually drop the temp of the extruder and probably retract filament a bit also.

So if you want to shut down the printer you need to print on blue tape.

Then you can pause the print and restart at the latest point but you have to do all of the gcode editing manually (with the risk of failing).

As Sander said, it's a secure machine, i'm guessing that people in your office leave some computers running all night long, to me the chance of fire is as big

Anyway putting the printer in a secured office, with no possibility of having something inflammable falling in it would be a good solution i think.

[Jtp 1]

Hi Guys,

Thanks so much for the interesting messages.

I have been in touch with Ultimaker via the ticket support system to try to get some official certification that the machine is safe to run unattended, but no-one seems to give that sort of direct answer. There are lots of documents and papers that have all sorts of compliance to various standards, but they don't give any sort of certification that it is fire safe. Is there anything that Ultimaker could send that might give that sort of certification that it is save to run unattended?

I am thinking of building a perspex cover that will protect it from objects falling in to the open top, does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations of things that I should be aware of?

Thanks again,

Bill

[SandervG 1,521]

Hi Bill,

We can only say it is CE approved, that means it meets certain quality requirements to say by European law it is safe.

We can not promise it will never catch fire because, theoretically, we don't know how exactly it is being used.. or abused.

So if a CE certificate is not sufficient I am not sure if we can do you a better note.

If you are looking for a cover, you could browse YouMagine, and look for a heated chamber like hack.

Good luck!

[nallath 1,124]

We do let printers run overnight in our office and we did add several features that should prevent a machine from catching fire.

Will we guarantee that it wont catch fire? Well, no. No company will do that, because it's impossible to say such a thing. Let a lone the legal consequences of saying that it's fire safe / proof (and it turning out its not the case).

[neotko 1,417]

Maybe build a thermal sensor system outside running from an external source and set a swith that connects to the 2 panic switches that make the um2 turn off any activity

http://ultimaker.com/en/community/view/6578-ultimaker-2-mainboardsafety-jumper

[danilius 118]

I think you will find that most Ultimaker users print overnight, since printing a bed full of small parts can take more than 8 hours quite easily.

It's a matter of hoping your supervisor can see sense and balance the risks as opposed to proving that the Ultimaker is safe, for whatever given value of "safe".

For example, electrical sockets are not absolutely safe. I have seen one bursting into flames. Would you leave an electrical socket switched on overnight?

[mastory 44]

One option would be to convince your management that you need to instead work from home so the office will be fire safe, and you will then be able to attend it full time. You could get paid to passively monitor the printer while being at home. What could be better?

[Lofrank 1]

stop a print, power down the printer, and resume the print job the next day

I also has such requirement...

Can UM2 just save the progress info (gcode) into disk when pausing? So after power off and power on, it remember where to continue.

[nallath 1,124]

Nope, it cant do that. Not sure how hard it would be to build it, but its not on the list atm.