Easy mid print Filament change & suspend for Smoothiewear

[innkeeper]

For those that have modified your M2 to a Smoothieboard or Smoothieboard comaptable.

This is somting i added to my config thats very useful, and isn't very aparent you can do this from the docs. thanks to Arthur of smoothiewear for helping me figure out how this could be done.

This is a suspend and resume off the menu, and will resume to the current print postion no matter how you jog the axis during the suspend.

Adding this to your custom menu will let you hit "Suspend" off the lcd menu.
the bed will move down, and the head wl then move to the typical urge location, and optionally, the heaters can stay on.

at this point, swap out filament using the standard retract and extrude, then hit "Resume" and the print will pick up exactly were it left off.
when resuming it will purge the head for 10mm and then move to resume the print.

what i do is i take a peace of stiff paper and put it on the side of the head so when it moves to actually print, it wipes the purged filament off the tip.

i understand there is some wiper that gets included with the current m2's but i'e never seen this thing. it would probably work well for this purpose.

i've also used the suspend and turned the heaters off when i needed to pause the print because i was leaving the house for a while, and didn't want to run the print un attended, it faithfully picks the print back up ware it left off with no defects i could find. i included a Picture below that had both a pause in it and a filament swap (swap is obvious and done purely for aesthetics) this is is a high layer height motor mount print i am doing for the mostly printed cnc machine.the other upside to being suspended is you can jog things around without concern, it will pick up right were it left off.

when i have time, i plan to add an automatic suspend for when "playing" a print off the sd card, and the filament runs out. so no more fears of the end of the spool.
fun stuff.

i think the config is pretty self explanatory.


Config changes:

Code: Select all

custom_menu.suspend.enable                true              #
custom_menu.suspend.name                  Suspend        #
custom_menu.suspend.command               suspend               #

custom_menu.resume.enable                true              #
custom_menu.resume.name                  Resume         #
custom_menu.resume.command               resume               #

leave_heaters_on_suspend true  # note this is entirely optional depending how you want it to behave. 

after_suspend_gcode	G91_G0E-5_G0Z10_G90_G0X205Y50

before_resume_gcode	G1_E10_F225-G91_G1E1_G90

mpcnc motor mounts

IMG_0499-800.JPG (191.17 KiB) Viewed 8699 times

[Tim]

That's very cool. I did a print pause with Marlin once long ago, and thought that the function of the pause must be to remember your location and move back to it after meddling with the printer position. No such luck (and one print I had to do over from the beginning). But I don't have an LCD and am wondering if you get the same function from "pause" and "resume" in S3D, or if the functions have to be modified to make use of the Smoothieware-specific suspend/resume function, or if it is something that can only be done with a hardware interrupt.

[innkeeper]

This will work via S3D
also works via telnet and via serial.

the commands are:

suspend
resume

you don't need the custom menu lines then in your config as you dont have the lcd obvioysly.
the reaming lines you should add.

even though suspend and resume does the heavy lifting for remembering the position and restoring it, it just freezes in place on suspend without the suspend and resume gcode. it potions the head on suspend and resume and does the purge on resume so you don't have any gap in extrusion when resuming, id consider those lines a necessity

[Tim]

Thanks!

I wonder what other features are hidden in the Smoothieware?

[innkeeper]

Let me know how it works for you, took me a few rounds of trial and error to get the gcode behaving as i expected and allowing the resume to behave correctly

i wrestled with the idea of moving the head to the purge position on resume, but, was worried about where someone might have left the head, so just have the move only in the suspend gcode.

what i want to do next, when i have time is have it suspend automatically when he filament runs out and your printing from SD. id think that would necessitate the suspend turn off the heaters for safety reasons though.
on the surface it seems pretty easy to do.