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Jan 2016

I had a random thought for this. I’ve been looking at the printer, and trying to determine where it measures the filament. If it’s at the feeder…ugh, but if it’s at the coil itself, wouldn’t it be possible to spoof it simply by locking a nearly empty roll in place, and just feed from an external roll looped around the empty and into the feed? Idk, I’m waiting for my new filament to show and I’ll see if it works.

What I noticed in my da Vinci 1.0 is that the printer doesn’t seam like it measures filament use, I think it calculates the usage in the slicer and basically subtracts it from the cartridges chip memory. There is an optical sensor in the extruder but I don’t think that it would be able to measure the use because the filament is always one color through out. I’m not sure if this is different in the da Vinci junior but it would be interesting to see how the printer does that. I’ll look into it more soon.

Hmm,.that could be, but how would it cope with a cancelled print if things went bad? Still deduct the filament even though it wasn’t all used? That would be unfortunate. Looking at the build, I can see 4 wires going to the feeder assembly. It may have a micro counter there which keeps track, and then writes back to the chip… Which sounds pretty feasible… Ugh… Well, its just a starter printer until I get better stuff down the road. Getting pretty decent prints off of it at least

You make a very good point. I didn’t even think about that. Hopefully someone figures out how to replace the firmware or how to trick the cartridge chip. They have some great people on the solid forum site working on it. Hopefully they will figure out something soon.

Yup, after doing some fiddling about, and ending a couple of prints, it looks like its measuring the amount of filament run through the feeder mechanism, probably as a measure per rotation setup, and then deducts it back from the chip until you hit zero. As long as there is a chip, that hasn’t hit zero, I’m pretty sure that you can run whatever through, but the chip has to be in location above its reader/writer . if the chip isn’t there, and it goes to write to it, bam, no more print, and you get a spool error. And the job gets cancelled . so its going to have to be some sort of spoof, sacrificial roll of filament, or software hack to be able to use other filament.

Maybe there is a way to trick the measuring mechanism. There is a small chance that it only uses it to measure the amount of filament being used and not for if filament is actually being moved through. Small chance, but it may be worth looking into. If that doesn’t work, easy solution thrown out the window. Other options are, faking the cartridge chip with an RFID tag, completely rewriting the firmware to the printer, or resetting the cartridges chips. Hopefully one of these are figured out soon. I’m hoping for the firmware rewrite. Due to the nature of XYZ’s software.

29 days later

That sadly does no good on a davinci Jr. Due to the way they’re chippd, won’t work.

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