I have some 12hr plus multi colour plates that I want to print and am not keen on leaving them unattended or overnight.
What I have settled on for an approach is:
Print long prints on Cool plate with Bambu Liquid glue rather than the textured plate that I normally use.
When needing to pause the printer:
Wait for a colour change to occur - if necessary removing the next filament from the AMS to cause printer to pause if too busy to sit and wait.
Wait for purge of new filament to happen, and press pause on X1C LCD screen
After a while the printer seems to pause while the head is still over the purge bucket.
Printer seems to request filament temperature to lower from 220 to 90.
Use LCD panel to change nozzle temp down to 35 (or probably zero).
Go out - just tried it for an hour
While out I used Bambu Handy to check printer still at 35 degrees
Get back - check print still holding to cool bed ok
Set temperature back to 220.
Once temperature up - press resume on lcd.
Printer seems to start back ok - got a bit of a lump of filament on purge block - which was luckily near the front - so might have to try leaving nozzle at 220 for a bit longer next time to give more of a chance for it to be wiped off.
I cut the lump off of the purge tower with pliers
Print seemed to continue ok.
Not sure how reliable this method is going to be long term - but am going to try it a few times over the next week and will report back.
Yeh sounds about right , i am relatively new to Bambu X1C but have done over 300 hours on the new toy , and once start a print keep it on unattended and overnight, the only thing i setup monitoring sensitivity to high , on medium once did not detect an actual problem and made a mess by the time i checked it . On high once or twice paused a print which was ok , but prefer to be safe . And just continued from where it stopped.
Thanks - don’t help sleep if I leave it overnight, plus not confident enough to leave printer going while out. AI Spaghetti detection has found problems a few times for me - mine is set at medium.
5hrs to go on an 11hr print - and I think I will retire in about 1 hr - so will probably try my pause method again and kick off the remaining 4 hrs tomorrow morning.
I have done multiple day prints with pausing the print over night. When you press pause, the current command finishes, then it moves over the purge chute and lowers the temp to prevent oozing. I leave it at the predefined temp over night and have never had an issue resuming in the morning. The heated bed stays at temp, so the part stays adhered. I have done this on prints using the cool plate, the textured pei, and the wham bam.
Thanks. Just restarted print after leaving it about 6hrs overnight and seems to have restarted perfectly.
Using this approach will be a bit of a game changer for me - as previously I have split designs up quite a bit to try and keep individual print lengths below about 4 hrs.
I like the fact that the fan goes off if you manually lower the nozzle temperature down below 49.
Tried pausing a print today not during a colour change for the first time.
The firmware seems to act differently - because when you are in the middle of a colour change, and do pause, then set the hot end temperature down to 35 the fans switch off once the temp gets below 49.
However if you pause mid print - tried both multi colour and single colour - then the fans don’t seem to switch off - even when you get right down to below 35 degrees.
Good news though was that I powered off (using tplink plug switch, not switch at back) and print resumed ok when I got back home.
Suspect this is not as good a way of doing things though - because with my second attempt at this I did get a small string of filament attached after the restart - so will stick to mostly only pausing during colour changes.
I do not think there will be any difference if you use the switch in the back instead. It is a simple, stupid hardware switch that feels just the same for the printer as cutting the power by using an external (smart or not) switch or simply pulling the plug.
Anyway, I am using a Z-Wave smart switch myself for convenience and never touch the hard-to-reach switch in the back. I just wanted to point this out just in case someone might get the impression that an external switch is required.
Thanks - wasn’t sure whether the printer was clever enough to know you hard turned off printer, rather than losing power. I’m also using my TPLink switches mainly for convenience too.
In future tests I might see what difference pressing the fairly useless power switch at the top of the printer does in terms of pause/power off/on/ restart behaviour - in case it has any useful features.
Just a quick update on this thread. I have now used this method probably more that 20 times and have never had to intervene with blobs on the purge tower like happened the first time around.
If you pause during a colour change then fans turn off by themselves once the hot end goes below 49 - which it will only do if you manually set the temperature down,
With other pauses you seem to have to manually turn off the fan.
Last use of this was a 39 hour print spread over a total of 60 hrs - see my Cruise ship thread for more details.
Something to keep in mind for structural prints - the sections where pauses occur may not have as strong a layer adhesion as the rest of the print.
I just experienced a power outage during a long print yesterday. I’m not sure how long the printer was off, but the print sat there almost the entire time I was at work. It recovered properly when I responded to the alert, and it looked fine, but after the print finished and I was removing it from supports, the part separated right where the pause happened.
At least it’s such a nice split that gluing it together should be easy!
For decorative prints that’s probably not as much of a concern.
Good point - I guess for planned long pauses, or planned power offs its best to make sure it is done on as big and strong a layer as possible to minimise the impact of weakened layer adhesion.
I guess for really large designs you could even design in spaces for internal fasters to be inserted to span the ''planned long pause" layers,
Thanks for sharing this update, I just got this new toy and no idea how to pause / should I pause… the noise seems to bother my housemate at night haha
