Hi everyone !
I’ve got some pretty large prints to do at the moment (the longest takes 60h+) and during the printing I noticed, that a bit of filament gets stuck to the outside of the nozzle, due to retraction, travel movements etc.
I had to pause the print at least 3 times, to clean the nozzle a bit,since that filament on the outside was ruining the printing of bridges and faster printed infill patters.
Some time ago I saw the lulzbot Mini, which has an auto nozzle cleaning function, in which the nozzle (heated to 100-150°C) rubs over a piece of heat resistant foam, to remove access material from the nozzle.
I was thinking about implementing this feature to other printers, like my Creatr HS by leapfrog.
Basically I want the printer to move to a specific position ( in X and Y ) to move over the foam and to perform the cleaning motion.
I know, how to work with G-Code and thanks to Simplify3d’s option, to add custom G-Code between layer changes, I was able to implement such movement, however Simplify3d only allows you to implement GCode, that gets executed EVERY LAYER SWITCH!
Of course I dont want the printheat to rub on the foam between each layer, especially since the prints have up to 1500 layers.
I’m now thinging about a solution, to implement this cleaning feature every 10 or 20 or 50 layers.
So either I need to install a counter in Simplify3d’s layer change G-Code, like so:
set layertimer =0 // this command will be executed once, before the print starts
if layertimer = 20
then perfom cleaning move //each 20th layer a cleaning move is executed
set layertimer = 1 //after the cleaning move the counting starts again
else set layertimer = layertimer+1 //continues counting, if the current layer wasnt the 20th
As I’m pretty sure, that such code won’t work in Simplify3d, I’ll have to add a custom G-Code that works as the timer (or even better, does the whole cleaning move).
If anyone here has experience with such programming, or has other suggestions/improovements, please share them with me !
Maybe someone from the 3dHubs staff, like @gabriela3d or @derKarsten know someone to help ?
Cheers,
Marius Breuer
