What is the maximum print speed the Palette 3 Pro can support?
What is the maximum print speed the P3P can support? I ran into an issue last night and I believe it is because the P3P couldn’t keep up with the speed of the printer.
I normally print at 75/mms with a 0.6mm nozzle with surface finishes at 90% of print speed. I was printing a simple 3 color badge with only 3 splices. On two occasions during the print I heard skipping from the extruder. On both occasions, the P3P was still working on a splice and the buffered filament was all used so there was a small tug of war going on between the extruder and the P3P. While the print completed there are visible lines missing from the top surface where the skipping occured and a little more than normal filament was left over after the print (expected due to skipping). I am able to recreate the issue so I am pretty sure that this is the case. I tried it again with a slower print speed (10% reduction) and the same thing occurred. Skipping only occurs when the P3P is still splicing and the buffered filament runs out. As soon as the splice is completed the P3P releases the filament and the extruder is able to resume. But the print quality suffers as no filament was layed down for the 2-3 seconds while the skipping occurred.
Suggestion:
Can there be an option in Canvas that will allow speed reductions during printing when the P3P has to splice?
Since Canvas is the slicer and the P3P controls the splicing why can’t Canvas set a lower print speed before/after a splice to ensure the buffer doesn’t run out and then set the speed back to normal when there are no recent/upcoming splices? During slicing Canvas can set the correct print speeds in the gcode/mcfx file. This would allow us to print at our normal print speed and have Canvas automagically lower the speed to ensure we don’t consume the buffered filament while the P3P is still splicing.
Of course, I can lower the overall print speed but to have Canvas handle it automatically would be a huge improvement (and time saver) as we could both leverage the ability of our printers and the P3P with no manual intervention (while achieving high quality prints).
Is this a good question?
I have had this happen often, at least the Palette 2S would slow down or pause the printer and not let hours of printing and meters of filament go to waste!
by Randy Savell
I have had this issue as well, ended up having to reduce my overall print speed by 50% from what I use normally, and had to very seriously slow down the transition purge moves - I use a dual-gear extruder that can push massive volumes of filament, so purging at full speed was almost always running the Palette out of buffer (especially if the print had a transition between black to white which requires 240 or so mm of filament)
by Zeno LeHericy
@zinventor can you think of a reason why Canvas couldn't be updated to set variable speeds around splices to ensure the buffer isn't consumed? From what I have observed, the P3P doesn't have any issues PULLING/PUSHING filament when I print with my normal setup at 75mm/s through a 0.6mm nozzle with 0.46mm layer heights and a 0.62 width. Filament travels through all paths without issues and splices remain strong. So this gives me hope that Canvas could slice the project with a user defined maximum print speed and then slow the print down based on Mosaic's volumetric flow rate algorithm to guarantee the buffer is never fully consumed. This would allow us to print closer to our desired max print speed while keeping the printer and P3P in synch further eliminating skipping and ruined prints.
It would require some mods in Canvas' UI and the slicing engine, but from a technical standpoint I can't see why this couldn't be implemented fairly easily.
On a side note: During Mosaic's livestream tonight, it was mentioned PETG cooling doesn't need to be as long as for PLA. I have been using the default settings that came with P3P which is tuned for PLA but I print almost exclusively in PETG. Out of the box, the P3P splices were rock solid so I had no reason to change them. I hadn't thought that I might be able to "cheat" an extra 1-3 seconds back per splice through a simple tune. I'll update the tune profile and see if that buys enough time to mitigate the complete buffer consumption/skipping issue. Of course, not everyone prints with PETG but hopefully, it can help or increase print speeds for those that do.
by Larry Schack
I definitely think it would be possible, however it may be a challenge.
My first thought was just to have the palate send feed rate override commands to the printer, but that could be problematic if the user wants to set a feed rate over ride independently for some other reason. That leaves actually changing the feed rate in G-Code, which may be a bit more complicated.
In the G-Code, the Slowdown would actually need to happen substantially before the splice occurs, because of the outgoing tube distance, which means that the software would need to account for variable length outgoing tubes and synchronizing. That being said, the software already accounts for that in generation of spice positions so I think it should work.
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by Zeno LeHericy
The other challenge would be that certain printers behave differently at different Sprint speeds, and this may cause problems with printing of small parts or parts that can get overheated easily oh, such as wood fill (which will darken if heated more) or other similar color change filaments, and even certain pla materials that will over melt if the nozzle sits in one place. Some materials (like pearl/shiny pla) also swell or shrink at different rates depending on the pressure in the nozzle, so consistent volumetric flow rate is likely to produce a much better result of a part where an inconsistent flow rate may create problems in the final print quality.
It may also cause additional problems with firmware is that handle pressure advance and other path planning algorithms.
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by Zeno LeHericy
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