I just finished removing about an hours worth of spaghetti from my P1P. It never fails. When I don’t watch the print for a few minutes after it starts, it fails. That prompted me to write about an idea that I have been pondering for a while.
It seems like it would be easy to detect spaghetti and other problems using the camera without any fancy AI programming. I am not an expert with photo manipulation, so I will just toss it out there and see if someone has the image manipulation knowledge.
I know that an image can be manipulated to alter the perspective, or the camera can be moved. My idea is that if you can take the image from the camera and change the perspective to be on the plane of the nozzle tip, that would give you a dividing line between the part of the object that has already been printed and the area above it. Then we can crop off the part being printed that is constantly changing.
Process:
Note: shift the perspective of all images used in this process to to match the plane of the nozzle tip
- capture an image before the print starts
- crop it to discard the part below the nozzle plane
- periodically during printing move the print head to the park position and capture another image
4 compare the initial image to the current image and if they are different then something is wrong with the print - pause and notify
It has been my experience that all my spaghetti issues end up with a birds nest that is above the nozzle plane.
The above process is not ideal because it requires moving the print head out of the way to capture an image which slows down the print.There are two ways to minimize that slowdown.
- let the user set a number of layers and only check after each multiple of that number
- also crop the left side of the image to exclude part of the print bed, which reduces the area being checked, but only requires the print head be in that area to be out of frame. This doesn’t slow down the printing.
If the printer does not have enough processing power to do the image manipulation or comparison then it could just send those special images to Bambu Studio to handle the checking for errors.