Filament Sensor Tripping Falsely on Shiny PETG
Great printer.
The filament sensor in mine seems to falsely think the filament has run out whenever I print with this shiny eSUN black PETG. The printer then runs through the unload/load sequence. It usually happens about 20 minutes into the print, then recurs every once and a while unless I turn the filament sensor off. Never happens when any of the PLA filaments I've used (all of which aren't as shiny).
I assume the shininess of the filament is throwing the sensor off? Has anybody else had this issue?
Re: Filament Sensor Tripping Falsely on Shiny PETG
Yes, it's been discussed in other threads and it's happening with other colours as well - see here for example.
Re: Filament Sensor Tripping Falsely on Shiny PETG
I had the issue as well a few times with PETG, but not every 20 minutes, just occasionally.
I realized that the filament sensor is off by default now, but I enabled it for a print where the filament was running low and it worked beautifully!
I came to check, filament spool was empty, unloaded, loaded new roll, continued printing!
Great feature!
I am hoping that as time goes by the function and stability of the sensor will be improved, but it's already a big help.
Re: Filament Sensor Tripping Falsely on Shiny PETG
Just stumbled over an interesting statement in another forum:
...during the development of the Ultimaker 3 we considered and tested to install a filament sensor in the Ultimaker 3. If you have ever taken the feeder apart you may have seen some space reserved for this.
Unfortunately, during testing the filament sensor triggered too many error messages and even though it helped detecting when the filament ran out, it generated too many false error messages which stopped the print when it shouldn't have.
For that reason we did not launch it...
I'm curious to see if Josef can do better!
- Martin
- Martin
Re: Filament Sensor Tripping Falsely on Shiny PETG
I´m sure it can be done, but it will probably be required to sample a lot of different materials from different manufacturers in different clours so it will certainly take time. Optical sensors can be tricky when asked to operate with a variety of colours and transparencies, we had this issue at work with a sensor that was supposed to check the postiton of a car and that was thrown off by every new colour that passed by until the tech properly adjusted the sensors (which took him about 3 months) for every colour.
i3 Mk3
Engineering Student
Re: Filament Sensor Tripping Falsely on Shiny PETG
Had the sensor on with PLA (Real filament brand) and it never triggered any false during printing (continuous printing for 8 hours or so)
Changed the filament to PETG (Real filament brand) and boom! after just a couple of minutes it triggered the filament sensor..
and it kept on doing it.. had even be very quick to get to the menu after loading to disable the sensor 🙄
Hmm.. guess what my main filament is... yup.. PETG.. so there goes that option.. (not that I would miss it that much.. I can handle a spool change on time myself, but that's not the point)
All those sponsored fanboys on Youtube? Didn't hear a peep out of them regarding this issue..
Just unboxing/building clips and promoting to "break" the machine by disregarding a manual..
Am I going off topic? yes.. sorry.. Had to get that off my chest..
Re: Filament Sensor Tripping Falsely on Shiny PETG
All those sponsored fanboys on Youtube? Didn't hear a peep out of them regarding this issue..
Just unboxing/building clips and promoting to "break" the machine by disregarding a manual..
Am I going off topic? yes.. sorry.. Had to get that off my chest..
This machine is a great example of 80/20 design. If you have some industry experience, you know that it takes very little effort for the first prototype and a huge amount of work to make things perfect. Throw a bunch of stepper motors and an Arduino to an apprentice and after a few weeks, you'll have a tiny machine happily sprouting out some molten plastic. To make it perfect, hire at least 20 R&D experts and let them work a few years, facing a multi-million budget.
When I first saw this class of reprap machines, I thought: What a piece of crap. Threaded rods, 8 bit controller, open loop stepper motors - stuff outdated by decades! In the meantime I see it a bit different. Yes, the stepper stuff is not great. But it makes the whole technology accessible. You don't need a control system expert fluent in laplace transforms for controlling a system like this, anyone with basic understanding can do it. It's cheap and - it works, mostly! Designing a working 3D printer without spending 10k on material is also a great achievement.
But then there's the 80/20. 80/20 means it works four out of five times. One out of five fails. One out of five filaments are not detected in the new sensor. One out of five layers have a layer shift. One out of five printed models fail halfway or cause a horrible extruder jam. The numbers are just symbolic of course, but you get what I mean.
A big problem with this machine (also for me) are expectations. You expect this machine to just work. Fact is, it fails - regularly. It might be you were too adventurous with a new material or you just had bad luck with a crap PSU. Either way - it's still light years to go. Accept it - or take a deep breath, cancel your Tesla model 3 order and buy a decent industrial printer instead.
On the bright side, often the printer works beautifully - I have some prints that are easily as good as from any high end industrial FDM printer I have come across.
But what we can expect from Prusa is that they iron out the most drastic bugs. Reading this forum, there seem to be plenty - but you never know how many people have machines out there that work fine (and don't post in the forum). For me, it's OK if I have to put one out of ten prints directly into the trash, but it shouldn't be much worse.
- Martin
- Martin
Re: Filament Sensor Tripping Falsely on Shiny PETG
+1 for BLACK Inland PETG (Perhaps made by ESun) setting off periodic false alerts. So far my other materials have worked fine.
Re: Filament Sensor Tripping Falsely on Shiny PETG
...lots of stuff
Martin, I wish I could like a comment on a thread because you hit the nail on the head.
Re: Filament Sensor Tripping Falsely on Shiny PETG
I just started printing with Matterhackers Black PETG in the US and and also seeing this same issue with false trips of the sensor.
Re: Filament Sensor Tripping Falsely on Shiny PETG
My Black Esun PETG runs for about 20secs before tripping the sensor. It's so bad I have to disable the sensor. It works fine with the yellow and white PLA I've been using.
Re: Filament Sensor Tripping Falsely on Shiny PETG
It's a common problem. A re-designed housing will apparently reduce false triggers, but it's not official yet. For now, disable the sensor when needed.