Unattended printing

Bambu Lab X1 Series General discussions
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Hi all,

I am new to 3D printing and new to the X1C but so far I love it. I am wondering about unattended printing and how safe it is. IE for big prints do some of you start it and go to bed, or perhaps head to work?

I am just wondering how trustworthy things are. Would not want to burn down the house.

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Many are doing it, but personally I wouldn’t recommend to a newbie to leave prints running overnight without some form of supervision or monitoring. I’m not saying it cannot be done, I’m simply saying that the risk for an unwanted and undesirable accident is greater for a newbie that for someone with long-term printing experience. It doesn’t mean such accidents don’t happen to those with long-term printing experience, cuz it does. Not that often, but it does. But it also doesn’t mean that such unwanted accidents are a regular occurrence, as they aren’t, but they do tend to happen according to “Murphy’s law”, which as you know, is a very optimistic law, stating that if anything can go wrong, it will…and enforcing its corollary If it can’t go wrong, it will go wrong anyway. So, to conclude, is whatever you wish to print worth such a risk? Or could the project be splitted in smaller parts with shorter print times?

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@drakko nailed it.

I would add the potential bad and the longer view.

Some might think the worst thing they could experience is wasted material, a lot of spaghetti on the build-plate. However, you could suffer a caked nozzle and a large build-up of material enveloping the print head.

This can damage the nozzle and even the entire print head might need replacing. It can be worse with other parts damaged as a consequence. The sooner these are caught, the less damage that can occur.

These do not happen often and with time you will know if these are more likely than not.

The first time you get a print failure from a print you set up, it might be a build-plate that needs cleaning or insufficient support for an unstable model.

In time, you will understand problems how they may start and on what models.

Time equals experience and as long as you learn for it, you can let things print as long as you like as you will know what to do to guarantee a print.

Your printer has a decent camera, and with Bambu Handy installed on a mobile device, you can monitor a print from a distance. Just make sure you can get back to the printer to fix a problem before the problem causes a real issue.

3D printers are almost like an appliance, like a microwave, but, not quite there yet.

Welcome to the world of 3D printing. Most love it and others really love it.

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Personally I do quite a few 30hr plus multi colour prints - but don’t like leaving them running unattended or overnight - but I usually do have them running in another room, and monitor them using the x1c camera and/or a wyze camera using an iPad.

I manage to do the very long prints using two different methods.

  1. Designing the models into separate parts that can be slotted together.
  2. Using ‘cool plate pauses’ - where I take advantage of the fact that the cool plate doesn’t require the bed heater, hot end or most of the fans to be left on when you pause prints for many hours. You can even power the printer completely off and resume.
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Thank you all for the input.

I suspected this would be the recommendation.

I have a long experience building instrument for high resolution measurement, factory automation, and in the last 15 years bio-medical. For each thing we build, we designed in sensors to ensure it could run unattended. But even with that there were those unexpected things that happened.

We automated a factory with large conveyers, sensors and re-direct arms. We had tons of sensors, sensing conveyor speed, weight on the conveyor etc. Our re-direct arms had dual sensors and position feed back. We wrote the software to be as fault tolerant as we could.

The line run about 25,000 cassettes of material through the conveyor line until one day when a worker placed a cassette on a table that had something sticky on it. Later when the cassette was placed on the feed point to the system whatever was on the cassette bonded a corner of the cassette to the conveyor. It travelled normally until it hit a redirect arm where it spun 90 degress and wedged sideways in the conveyor. Cassettes began to build up behind it and our weight sensor detected the excess weight and stopped the line but not before about 3 cassettes of very expensive material flipped over and split.

Murphys law as they say!

I think I will reserve my longer prints for the weekend when I can be around to watch them.

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Yeah…thing is, they say…and we suffer the consequences :sweat_smile:

Wise choice :+1: