Troubleshooting Palette [Work in progress]

Introduction

Palette 2/3 are a wonderful pieces of equipment but they need to be operated in a well defined setup. While P3 has intelligence to learn about the printers behaviour, it cannot cope with a lot of randomness... so even though some corrections may be possible, the overall performance of the printer must consistent to start with.

In this section we'll look at some issues you may encounter and try to identify possible solutions.

PINGS

Pings are a way of palette to communicate status of an ongoing print. Pings indicate the amount of filament used vs the amount of filament required according to the Gcode file. Though ideally this number should be around 100% the actual value itself is not so important... what is important is that it is constant (+/- 0.5% over the entire print)

P2PP eg by default makes ping-checks every 350mm so a deviation of +/-1.75mm is enough to already get you out of this tolerances

Sources of deviations in pings can be:

• Loading issue: if the filament is not at the end of the nozzle when loading is performed, either some filament will be already extruded or extrusion will not start right away when the print starts.
• Extruder issues if the extruder if losing steps, or filament is slipping in the extruder (P3 generates quite a bit of drag on the filament, so extra tensioning may be required.
• Splice Issues Splices should be very consistent and very close to your filament diameter, fast splices may generate extra drag or cause blockings in the extruder that result in under usage, thin splices may break easier but also may cause slippage when passing through the extruder gears causing under extrusion there.
• P3 Scroll Wheel Issue if the P3 is not correctly registering the amount of filament passing the measurements will obviously be off as well.

Saving prints

Whenever a print finishes, P3 will ask if the print was successful. It does this to determine if it should update the learning information with the newly gathered info from this print. In general: If there have been no mechanical issues and the object comes out as expected (regardless of any color issues) you should save the print. Next time you print things should get better. If you have any technical issue with the print (first layer issues, loading offset not being correct, ...) don't save the print!