having a look at the total time the printer has printed, I noticed some flaws in the counting mechanisme. First of all, the total print time of the job is added after the print job is fully completed. During the print, the counter stays at the number of hours at the start of the print job. Second, a failed or cancelled print job is not counted as printed time.
My conclusion: The total time shown is not representative for the actual time printed, especially if you abort a print or have a failed print. Am I right?
So you’re saying the Printer Used Time in the printer’s menu is only updated at the end of the print job, meaning there’s some command being run that increments the printer used time by the length of the print, and the issue is in a print cancel situation those hours won’t be updated.
First, this issue boils down to the fact that the hardware control system doesn’t maintain the printer time in realtime. Bambu printers (most every 3D printer, really) run extremely basic controllers that do not have a lot of “extra capacity” during a print - they’re running a realtime print operation, which is all your heaters, all your fans, steppers, the extruder, which are all “mission critical” functions.
We have a lot of other clues from other aspects of how Bambu printers run that tell us there isn’t much additional headroom to do other things, which tells me we probably will never see a live counter.
Based on that, the strategy of updating the runtime clock at the end of a print is probably what we’re left with.
Now, is that a bad thing?
Bambu warranties aren’t based on hours. Maintenance intervals are. If there are truly a lot of late failures in prints, especially large prints, the printing hours will be artificially low. My opinion is Bambu’s maintenance intervals are fairly conservative, and the printer also detects abnormal loads and will throw a message that lubrication is needed.
I have to question what the actual % difference would be between reported print time and actual print time - I think for most users it would be a very low number indeed.
That said, bug-report Bambu, is there a way to have the “print canceled” function update the printer hours meter with the actual print time as it currently doesn’t seem to?
