4.4 Manual Extrusion
For greater control and the ability to experiment with extrusion settings and materials, we have
enabled a manual mode control. This is excellent for discovering new materials or adjusting
existing plastics processing settings based on your ambient conditions. A lot of these
instructions are going to be similar if not identical to the Automatic Mode instructions. We copied
a few of them here for ease of reference.
4.4.1 Manual Extrusion Steps
1. Once you’ve clicked “Begin Extrusion” (see “Initial Extrusion Steps”, above)...nothing will
happen. Prot is now awaiting your commands to do pretty much anything. You’ll
have to heat up and begin the extrusion process, well, manually!
2. Note that there are a lot of different things happening in automatic extrusion, and you
have to set and control all of them in manual mode. It is not easy! Please ensure you
have fully read and understood the Prot Command Center Overview -
particularly the sections and appendices on how to extrude manually, and what all the
commands do - before attempting manual extrusion on your own. Note as well that this
guide is very brief, but should at least get you up and running.
3. Begin the thermalization process by sliding the temperature sensor to the desired
setting. A safe starting point is whatever the data sheet for your plastic says, minus ~30
C. Do NOT use the settings that you would 3D print with! For instance, PLA usually 3D
prints around 190-220 C, and the datasheet suggests 200 C for processing. However,
Prot’s patented MixFlow system requires a temperature of only ~180 C for PLA,
so we would want to thermalize around 170 C.
4. Before turning on your auger feed, we need to disable the lower pressure bound by
entering in the command line: “pl000000”, no quotes, and clicking “send command”. This
will prevent stalling during the preheat and priming phase.
5. Now set your auger speed via the slider, somewhere in the lower half of the range until
the system has fully preheated.
6. Allow the melt section to thermalize for 100 seconds once up to temperature (set in step
4).
7. Following thermalization, you may begin the extrusion temperature preheat. Using the
slider set to the desired temperature - As in step 3, you want to set the temperature
notably lower than the datasheet or 3D printing knowledge would suggest. For PLA, a
temperature of 180 C is a good starting point.
Always start low and increase as
needed, not the other way around!
8. Once the plastic has reached its correct temperature and is correctly flowing out of the
nozzle, we can now set the lower pressure bound back to its default. Enter “pl000025” in
the command line, no quotes, and click “Send command”. For more information on the
PL term, consult the extrusion theory guide.
9. Turn on your fan using the slider. This may vary depending on what material you are
processing. Essentially, we want the plastic to be soft enough to start spooling easily. If
the plastic is too cool then it will be very stiff and difficult to begin spooling with. Similar to
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Summary of Contents for ProtoCycler+
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Page 3: ...6 0 Congratulations 32 7 0 Appendix 33 2...
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