Prusa printer farm settings?
I've searched the forum, but haven't found a good (and verified accurate) description of the conditions in the print farm. Since they seem to be getting very good results out of it, I'm hoping to reproduce the conditions as well as I can. I realize different ABS blends will require different settings, I'm not asking for help with a specific ABS, just wanting to know what Prusa runs at and why.
Ambient temp: (I've read both 40C and 50C from Josef)
[August 14, 2016] Our farm does have 1200 hours of print time every day, 50°C ambient and 270°C nozzle temp and it runs alright.
[May 21, 2016] ABS will be always tough to print, even we fight with it sometimes in our enclosed print farm with 40°C air and no draft.
Bed temp, extruder temp (have read both 260 and 270C)
Bed prep (clean with IPA?, ABS juice?, etc)
Layer height, infill type, amount, etc. 0.2mm seems commonly quoted, 20-25% infill.
Horizontal and vertical shell settings.
Slic3r settings that vary from the defaults (assuming what the prusa edition starts at as the default)
Overall I've been getting good results (using Makergeeks grey ABS at 260-270C and 105C bed). The main issues I've seen are edges lifting up, which is well managed with a brim but I'd rather not have to trim it off later. Since the print farm seems to not have this issue, I'm interested how they did it. I have built a 60cm (2ft) cube enclosure out of foam insulation and it has made the biggest improvement in quality of anything I tried, but the edges lifting issue persists. I want to avoid glue sticks, abs juice, or anything other than the standard PEI bed if possible and it seems like Prusa (obviously) has it figured out.
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
Bump.
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
The Prusa Printer Farm, is an environment maybe us ordinary folks could not afford. Josef has already mentioned power supply problems and Diesel electrical generators in the past. Which he has had to move on from. Maybe he has gone back to the grid?
As regards ABS look to newer materials like NGEN. Or PLA Plus < from RigidInk. My current favourite filament. It gives great prints on my Genuine Prusa I3 MK2. And is as robust as ABS.
Nigel
Life is keeping interested and excited by knowledge and new things.
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
The Prusa Printer Farm, is an environment maybe us ordinary folks could not afford. Josef has already mentioned power supply problems and Diesel electrical generators in the past. Which he has had to move on from. Maybe he has gone back to the grid?
As regards ABS look to newer materials like NGEN. Or PLA Plus < from RigidInk. My current favourite filament. It gives great prints on my Genuine Prusa I3 MK2. And is as robust as ABS.
I'm not trying to build a 50 printer farm, just get consistent good results with ABS out of my single printer. A diesel generator is not going to make Josef's machines run any better, it's to deal with a flaky electrical grid which I suspect was his real problem. The printer power supplies don't care that they get their 240VAC (or whatever it is there) from a generator or a grid. Regarding other materials, NGEN and PLA Plus are roughly 2x the cost of ABS per kg. Plus I'd like to be able to solvent weld multiple parts together which is easy with ABS. For parts where I'm less concerned about the above factors, I'll use PLA or PETG.
My question is what settings and ambient conditions do they use to get good prints with ABS. I appreciate any input, but let's stick to the topic here.
I spoke with Prusa support for a bit yesterday about this. They stated the print farm has an ambient around 40C and that they don't use anything like ABS juice or glue stick to prep the beds other than cleaning them. Achieving 40C ambient is easily doable for us mere mortals, just build a box out of rigid foam insulation around the machine and leave a little room for air to convect in and out. A basic temp controller and a hot plate would make it even easier. Again, I just want to know what they're doing. Given it's an open source product, I think it's a pretty reasonable request.
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
Sorry david.w8 if my reply did not suit you. It was just my opinion. To achieve a 40 degree Centigrade environment Prusa Research uses, is a tall order and for a single open frame genuine Prusa I3 MK2 printer will require an oven like housing like the DaVinci 1.0A series of ABS printers. Other materials are taking over from ABS. Due to its difficulties in printing and the toxic fumes.
Nigel
Life is keeping interested and excited by knowledge and new things.
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
No worries, I'm not trying to be a jerk. I just have my reasons for ABS for some circumstances and want to be able to succeed with it. I threw together an enclosure from a sheet of rigid foam insulation, and after about 30 minutes or so the inside was at ~35C with just the build plate turned up to 100C. Getting the whole thing up to 40-45C wouldn't be that bad with another heater. I have some industrial PID temperature controllers (not the cheap chinese stuff) sitting around just waiting for a project but before I set something up I want to be sure it's possible. Even at 35C ambient the parts look much better and I've even got a few to stick fully with ABS juice, but they were a pain to remove
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
I agree with David, it would be very helpful and interesting for Prusa to share their experiences running a printer farm. Very few 3D printer companies "eat their own dog food" in this way. The shipped prints are consistently high quality.
In addition to ambient temperatures and printer settings it would be great for Prusa to share their operating and maintenance procedures in a video or document:
- Adhesion procedure
- Physical checklist. How often is each printer physically checked? What is checked?
- Calibration procedure. How often are the printers re-calibrated? Only when they fail? Periodically?
- Spare parts most commonly used. What fails? What to keep on hand?
Regards,
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
He is the video of the farm in action:
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
I may have missed something but I read Prusa's comment about 40c (104f) as a result of all those printers being in an enclosed environment not as a temp they are intentionally maintaining.
Did I read it wrong?
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
I was able to print all of the critical parts and many to a print doing nothing fancy. I assume when they keep saying "the room is at 40C" that really that's all they care really worry about or feel concerned about. All the prints worked fine for me even using a non-prusa PLA, I just had to tune in the heat settings a bit on some previous prints.
The only issue I ran into (and continue to) was when I had to print the "HOT" cover for the fan. The lettering for the HOT was on the bottom side and for some reason the print kept detaching mid print. I eventually just brimmed and threw glue at it.
I have the same lifting issue with other prints (dice that I'm doing now for example). Does anyone else have this problem with "holes" in the base and not having it stick? And then I wonder if the farm has this type of issue too... perhaps they have that one printer that does nothing but print this part and always has a nice layer of glue on it 🙂
I would also be interested in knowing what parts seem to break most often for the farm, I want to be prepared for whatever goes wrong first.
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
I would be interested in these settings, too!
Some people in this forum are concerned about the electronics and stepper motors getting too hot when putting the i3 in an enclosure. But when Prusa's printing farm really operates in these high temperatures this may not be a problem at all...
Design, Print, Repeat
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
All the prints worked fine for me even using a non-prusa PLA, I just had to tune in the heat settings a bit on some previous prints.
PLA isn't generally an issue to print with, I was wondering about ABS since the working temperature of parts made with ABS is higher than PLA.
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
I needed to print one of the pieces from the extruder assembly, so I printed it in ABS since it was in contact with the hotend. It came out looking perfectly, but was smaller than the original part supplied in the kit. The nuts would not fit in the holes either. I wonder if they scale it up a tad to compensate for ABS shrinking when they slice it. I am going to try that myself.
As far as infill settings go on the parts they supply with their printers and kits, when I hold them up to the light and can see the infill inside it looks more like a 10% infill to me. Once I get the scaling percentage figured out for my setup, I think I will reprint the whole extruder assembly with 25% infill in ABS.
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
I needed to print one of the pieces from the extruder assembly, so I printed it in ABS since it was in contact with the hotend. It came out looking perfectly, but was smaller than the original part supplied in the kit. The nuts would not fit in the holes either. I wonder if they scale it up a tad to compensate for ABS shrinking when they slice it. I am going to try that myself.
As far as infill settings go on the parts they supply with their printers and kits, when I hold them up to the light and can see the infill inside it looks more like a 10% infill to me. Once I get the scaling percentage figured out for my setup, I think I will reprint the whole extruder assembly with 25% infill in ABS.
Would be nice to know how much it has to be scaled up. Yesterday I printed another filament guide ( http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1657908 ) but it doesn't fit on the frame, it is too small.
If I find the time I'll try to find out how much the Prusa ABS is shrinking, too!
Let us know your results Dustin 🙂
Design, Print, Repeat
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
I was just printing a couple of printer parts for a 3DHubs order. All printed in the original orange ABS with 20% infill. They came out quite good 😎 . I compared them to the parts on my printer and they look like they have almost the same dimensions. Measuring them with a caliper shows they didn't shrink more than 0.5mm (max). Maybe my enclosure which heated to around 37°C during the print helped to avoid shrinking a bit....
Design, Print, Repeat
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
Ill give my 2 cents
I think they use their Easy ABS since I bought a roll of their regular orange ABS and is not the same texture and the shade is a bit off but is really close so its possible.
I dont think they use Slic3r as the slicing Not that it matters too much as parts come out just as good quality wise is just that they are not built the same way.
and their layer height is .3mm ( I counted.) .35 is too think and .2 is way too small
I broke my extruder assembly and did a lot of trial and error to get similar parts and asked a few questions in their Chat.
the best closest reproduction of the original part was by using their ABS, S3d with their settings and .3mm layer height with a bag over the top of the printer after the first layer. The only difference was in the bridges that where perfect on the original part and in mine they where a bit off.
Re: Prusa printer farm settings?
I dont think they use Slic3r as the slicing Not that it matters too much as parts come out just as good quality wise is just that they are not built the same way.
While this is possible, I'm not so sure. Since no one has actually seen the original gcodes we can't be sure, but the gcodes they released for the MK2S upgrade pieces were sliced with Slic3r at 0.2mm layer height. Here is part of the header...
; generated by Slic3r 1.33.8-prusa3d-win64 on 2017-03-08 at 13:22:06