I am so incredibly unreasonably excited by how well this worked.

One thing I wanted to do this Christmas was put money in some 3d-printed gift boxes/envelopes. I couldn't get my head around the machine to get it to work right in time, unfortunately.

I got it tonight, though!

RESULTS!!!

The glaringly obvious lines are results of me hitting the pause button. I can't wait to do this for every for someone's birthday.

I generated the Gcode using Slic3r. Dunno why, just kinda got to liking that one.

I set up some custom gcode in the "Pause" and "Resume" fields in MatterControl to move the print head out of the way so I could drop the payload in. The only downside to this is that I had to be there to physically hit the buttons on my computer. I gotta figure out how to do this in the Gcode files, that way I can have it pause automatically at wherever I need it to. Does anyone know how to make the printer pause as if I hit the pause button in MatterControl?

I know Cura has a "pause at height" plugin, but all it would do for me is pause for... ever. Couldn't get it to restart. It wasn't a "normal" pause. :/

Anyway, since I had a hell of a time finding a solution, I figure someone might be able to use it. Here's the gcode I used for the Pause and Resume fields in MatterControl.


Pause Gcode. This moves the print head away so you can put something in the print:
G91; set to relative positioning

G0 E-3; retract to avoid the stringing

G1 Z1; Go up 1mm, by itself to clear the part

G1 X50 Y50; Move the head to the right and the buildplate forward.


Resume Gcode. Just undoes everything the above code does:
G1 Y-50 X-50; reset the x and y

G1 Z-1; Drop the z back down.

G90; set positioning back to absolute for the rest of the print

 

Nice!

 

I think (if you have the LCD controller) you can use the "Change Filament" command in one of the menus to do essentially the same thing.

Fair warning that the printer will scream at you until you're done putting whatever inside the box and click the LCD button to tell it to resume printing though.

 

M600 is the command. I couldn't make that one work. I run a cheap android controller.