What good is extrusion calibration when there's nothing laid down?

I had my first hot end clog this weekend. At first, I didn’t know I had one, didn’t understand why the print had failed.

I tried several more prints (simpler ones) trying to figure out what was happening. The X1C went through all the regular motions of bed leveling, then extrusion calibration, etc.

The thing is, nothing was coming out of the hotend. I don’t understand what “calibration” the printer was doing if there was nothing for its various vision systems to detect. One would expect it to stop and throw up an error - “Nothing detected”. Instead, it literally went through the motions of scanning the front edge where it normally lays down the calibration lines.

Is extrusion calibration actually doing anything at all? Or is it wasting my time and my filament performing calibration theatre?

Well, extrusion calibration does work quite nicely on my X1. However, if it can not detect anything (no matter if this is due to a dirty lens, a broken LIDAR or a blocked nozzle), it will just use default values rather than throw up a warning.

It is documented in the wiki here in the “Select Flow Dynamics Calibration Before Printing” section.

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The calibration lines are not evaluated until they are all in place, there is no prior attempt to detect filament flow. The X1C goes through “all the regular motions” to lay down the lines because until it does, the camera does not look.

I use the automatic calibrations only when I’m in a hurry to use a new-to-me spool of filament. I am only rarely in a hurry to print anything with a new material.

Normally, my new filaments are calibrated manually from OrcaSlicer and the results saved to a filament preset. That does take a little chunk of time, but then it saves several minutes at the beginning of every subsequent print because the automatic flow dynamics box can be unchecked.

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