I try to use the auto refill option so that I don’t have short pieces of filament left.
Auto refill works quite well. After finishing the first filament, he feeds a replacement filament and starts printing with it.
However… There is always a trace left on the printout where the filament was changed to another one. It’s some excess plastic or something.
I understand that to make it perfect, such as when AMS changing colors, the slicer builds a prime tower so that the printout will be clean later.
Is there any possibility to force the slicer to create a prime tower when I know that the filament is running out?
So that the newly auto-changed filament is used on the prime tower before it is used on the printed element? Just like what happens when ams changes colors?
A “Smooth Timelapse” in “Other” settings enforces a prime tower.
I’m not sure that forcing a prime tower will accomplish what you want. It will cause a tower to be printed, but if the filament runs out I think it’s likely that the print will still resume right where it left off and not default back to the prime tower (it’s even likely that the prime tower for that layer would have already been printed).
It’s true, just adding a prime tower won’t help if the printer doesn’t start printing on it first with a new filament.
In the case where the prime tower has already been printed for this layer, it is also ■■■■.
Is there any other solution that allows you to use leftover filament without losing print quality?
Some solution is certainly possible, after all, AMS detects when the end of the filament comes off the spool. If only the current layer was finished and the new one from the prime tower was started on a new filament, there would be little waste and there would be no loss in quality.
None that I know of without a lot of intervention. I’m not sure about the standard AMS as I have an A1 with an AMS Lite, but my understanding of the AMS Lite is that it doesn’t report when the filament runs out as such. After loading, the AMS Lite goes into a passive odometer mode. It then checks in and reports how much filament has passed the gear at certain intervals and the printer then compares that to how much filament it has used to make sure they match. If they don’t it assumes that the filament has broken in the PTFE tube and reports a possible AirPrint situation.
On the A1, a sensor near the top of the extruder is what detects when the filament has run out, so the printer itself has no real warning when the filament is about to run out - only when it basically already has run out.
As far as using the little pieces the most straightforward way would be to unload the main spool as it goes into a large section of infill and then manually feed it the small pieces to use in that infill. A huge amount of work. There are also devices available that will combine pieces by melting the ends together so you can basically connect all your small pieces into a longer piece. They’re not really all that cheap though and it would take a lot of use to save enough filament to offset the price of the splicer.
Personally I just put all my small pieces aside and when I have a small print weigh my small pieces to see if any are large enough to cover that print and if so use it then. I also print a good bit of PETG so I use small leftover pieces of PLA if one of those PETG prints needs support, but you do have to be careful there because depending on the number of layers that have both support and the print, you can quickly lose more filament to frequent filament changes than you save by using that small piece. Otherwise I just cut even smaller pieces off of them to use when I do cold pulls.