I realise that stopping a print and resuming later is a problem largely due to the plate needing to remain warm/hot to hold the print but if the industry intent is to put 3D printers in every home…then Stop, Switch Off, Resume From Cold would be a requirement…and the printer company who gets this right will have a big advantage in the marketplace.
@Peter_Wraxall
So what? A pause function that would keep the hot-bed on, raise the nozzle and resume even when paused durin a partially executed g-code line was state of the art in my very first printer. Maybe 5 years ago. (RepMan 3.0)
That’s a BASIC feature.
No…a bit more than that…you would need some sort of physical device to keep/clamp the print in place as the hot-bed is switched off and the printer would hold the g-code position in memory with the power off…then when you switch back on in the morning the physical place holder is removed as the hot-bed reheats and the print continues.
Alternately the printer enclosure could be an air tight seal and before printing starts the oxygen content is reduced (partial vacuum) which should reduce the chance of fire.
Also…if a printer knows the dimensions of what it is printing, one could have a scanner within the printer that would determine that something is going wrong with the print and either abort immediately or send a message to your phone that something is wrong with the print…that way less filament is wasted.
I suspect though that these ideas may already exist in high-end commercial printers but will struggle to get to the consumer market due to cost implications.
@Peter_Wraxall clamping doesn’t work because the part warp off as soon as it cools. You can’t re-attach it.
The plate itself also cools and shrinks and thus the part pops off.
so…ditch the hot-bed…cold-bed…spray a special kind of adhesive on the cold bed just before printing starts…the heat of the first layer forms a bond through a thermal reaction between the adhesive, print and cold-bed …and the bond is secure enough to withstand the printer motions, but will be brittle enough to remove. The benefit then would be reduced fire risk as no hot-bed and reduced power consumption…I would imagine an 80 hour print must claim quite a lot of electricity from the hot-bed alone.
@Peter_Wraxall what “brittle enough” means defends on them surface area of your geometry. I really, really likes my prints to mostly pop afterwards cooling. Because of they don’t, I may damages a part that took a week to print while forcefully removing it.