On our livestream this week, we showed off the newest addition to our Quinly software: webcam integration. This is a highly requested feature from our community and it is finally here! The update allows you to plug in a USB webcam or Raspberry Pi camera into Quinly and use the video feed to monitor your prints. This allows you to keep an eye on your printer status and be able to cancel or queue more prints without getting up to find your printer. This makes the Quinly system even more hands free, since you don’t have to stay next to the printer to make sure that everything is running properly. Along with this update, we are supplying a mount for a Raspberry Pi camera to give the best view of your print as it is being made. As the summer goes along, we have more plans for software upgrades using the webcam, so having the perfect angle will be crucial

Our custom webcam mount allows for a good view of your prints.

The webcam will be viewable from the same interface you already use to upload, queue, and run prints. This means that you will have access to the stream from anywhere in your home. This will make it easier to monitor your prints when printing in an enclosure which some materials find helpful. Combined with the VAAPR bed’s great adhesion and release, you’ll be able to print many hours of materials like ABS stress-free! The webcam also makes it easier to run printers that are in basements or crawl spaces, where it is often a lot of work to go down to the printer to monitor it. The Quinly kit is all about reducing work for the print operator, so having a trouble free method to look at your printer adds a lot to the experience that we are aiming for.

With a Pi cam or USB webcam, you can print from anywhere in your home. Printing won’t make you leave the dinner table early because you can see what’s happening on your printer from your phone or laptop. When combined with Quinly, it will drastically cut down on the time you have to spend with your printer in order to get the prints that you want. More printing with less effort, it’s what we are about here at 3DQue.

Have you installed a webcam on your Quinly system? Send us your setup on social media and we may show it on one of our weekly livestreams!

When it comes to 3D Printer upgrades and modifications, there are few as popular as new print surfaces. Most buildplates that come with printers are alright, but they wear quickly and aren’t effective for use with all print materials. It’s for this reason you likely have already purchased new print surfaces, or potentially even amassed a collection of them for your printers. With the new bed surface we announced on our livestream this week, though, we think you will be able to do away with swapping beds and applying adhesive. The PolyLock bed serves the purpose of many beds, with characteristics that stay consistent across a range of different materials. With this bed upgrade, you will be able to print whatever material you want while maintaining good stick and easy release. This new bed improves even further upon the technology we’ve been developing at 3DQue and it has the ability to massively improve your printer experience.

We based the PolyLock bed off of our existing VAAPR bed so it does have some characteristics in common. The difference is that without the need for automation we could increase the adhesion of PolyLock, giving it an even larger margin for error with print tuning. We are also offering PolyLock in many sizes so you can almost definitely find one that suits your printer setup. If you don’t see one that fits, send an email to info@3dque.com and we might begin offering that size when we do the full release! You have the option to purchase just the bed for clipping on to your heatbed or you can buy adhesive with it to stick it firmly to your printer or a spring steel sheet. Once attached, PolyLock will firmly grasp onto any 3D Printing polymer you throw at it, then release at around 300C for most materials. All of this performance without any wear or added adhesives. If you take care of it, your PolyLock bed will likely outlast the 3D Printer you mount it to!

The 235x235mm bed is compatible with a wide variety of printers.

So, if you have been struggling with getting the right adhesion on your prints, or are getting frustrated with parts that just won’t release, a PolyLock bed might be the upgrade you need. Print with PETG, PolyCarbonate, and ABS trouble free, and leave a glass smooth surface on the bottom of your prints. All of this without any complex setup or special adhesives overtop, it just works. If you want to purchase a PolyLock bed, you can go to our presale at https://shop.3dque.com/collections/polylock-bed. And finally, make sure to send pictures of your prints with PolyLock to our social media page for a chance to be featured in our livestreams!

Our stream this week was a little different than they have been in the past, we counted down 10 different things that we wish we had known since starting our print farm. Some of you may not know, but 3DQue started well before we released the Quinly kit, and back then our main focus was automation of 3D printing in an industrial setting. Even back in those days, we ran a very large print farm of Ender 3s, so we have gained a lot of experience and learned a lot about what to do and what not to do in a print farm. Some of these tips are modifications to printers, while others are modifications to your workflow. So for all of you who hope to start up a print farm, or are even just interested in the process, these tips could become very useful.

A highly modified Ender 3, not the best candidate for a print farm unless all upgrades have been thoroughly tested.

One mistake we made early on was modifying our existing print farm without enough testing of how the upgrade will work and affect the printer. You’re reading Mod Mondays, so you probably enjoy modifying printers but if you are relying on your printers for your business you have to be more cautious. You can’t just jump the gun on whatever upgrade looks the best, parts should be thoroughly tested on one of your printers before you even think about investing the time and energy into installing it onto every other printer in your shop. 

The cost of adding automation can pay itself off in human hours.

Costs add up when you’re modifying a whole farm’s worth of printers, so you want to make sure that when you spend money on your printers, it’s going into something that will save you money in the long run. Things like more reliable hotends, extruders, or a Quinly kit are generally good because they will save human hours which are very costly.

Discord and Reddit can be great places to find other 3D Printing enthusiasts to help you out!

One of the best parts of 3D printing is the amazing community. Troubleshooting problems gets very frustrating but if it’s happening to you, it’s very likely that someone else has had the same problem and fixed it. Being involved in Discord, Reddit, and Facebook groups that are centred around 3D printing gives you access to many very knowledgeable people that can help you out. When running a farm, down time gets costly so it pays to have people that can help you diagnose and fix problems.

Parts can warp and split at incorrect ambient temperatures.

All polymers, even the “easier” ones will perform poorly at extreme or fluctuating temperatures. Not enough cooling, being too cold, and having a draft can all be detrimental to otherwise functional gcode. When setting up your farm, don’t put it in a cold, drafty basement or a greenhouse, try and control the ambient temperature to match the requirements of your material. On our farm, we had to install an air conditioner to get it down to the right temperature, and it drastically improved the quality of our prints and the yield rate of our printers.

Keep it organized!

Note the green cards here which indicated that the printers had been fixed recently

3D Printing is messy. Filament falls everywhere off of failed prints and loose spools roll easily, but try your best to keep the farm itself organized. Giving yourself the ability to easily check if a printer is working or what needs to be done to get it working will save you tons of time. Also, having a system for sending and removing prints will make organizing jobs so much easier. Find a system that works for you and you’ll have great success automating huge orders.

Flat and smooth parts like these face shields are ideal for printing.

Oftentimes, customers will come to you with prints that aren’t very printable. You might be inclined to just use many supports or print it on a raft, but in our experience it is usually worth the effort to redesign the part to print as fast and easily as possible. Optimizing the print gives a better looking final product, higher success rate when printing, and faster print times. When we printed face shields in 2020, we were able to get incredibly low print times and high yields because of how well the parts translated to 3D Printing.

Much like redesigning a part, reslicing can save you hours of print time and massively increase your success rate. There are many nuances to slicing, and we could make many articles with how many tips we have for it, but when running a farm you will have to practice it a lot and you will learn tons about how to do best.

Sequential prints like these can give much higher yields than batch prints which all print at the same time.

Something that’s been surprising to learn from our experience at 3DQue is that batch printing is usually not the best way to approach large orders. With batches, there’s a relatively high failure rate of parts falling over during the printing process, bringing other parts down with them. There’s also surface quality issues that come up when stringing forms between the parts, which can also make for costly post-processing. For small parts, we like to use the sequential printing setting in Cura which allows the parts to be printed one after the other without waiting for cooldown and removal in between. For everything else, printing one at a time seems to work really well.

The printing time of these key cap display boxes were reduced dramatically after switching to 0.8mm nozzles.

This has become a favourite among the 3DQue staff. 0.8mm nozzles have allowed us to drastically reduce print time for many of our parts. All Quinly parts are printed on 0.8mm now and it has the added benefit of increasing the strength of the finished parts as well. If you only have a 0.4mm nozzle, you can set the line width to 0.8 however you will also have to reduce your print speed. We highly recommend 0.8 for industry as you will see your print times go down as your strength goes up.

Running different colours of the same brand can keep slicing time low.

The final point is something that we’ve struggled with a lot. When running a farm, you will go through a lot of filament, so you need to find a reliable source that gives you consistent quality. Many filament manufacturers slightly change formulas or suppliers as time goes on, which is fine for consumer 3D Printing, but can ruin a production run. Make friends with suppliers and ensure that you have consistent quality so that you can keep your slicer profiles and maintain maximum efficiency. 

We hope this helps improve your print farm goals! If you want more detail, we have uploaded the whole livestream with timestamps to our youtube channel along with a highlight video so make sure to check them out. Do you run a print farm with Quinly? Send us a photo of your setup for a chance to be featured on our next stream!