Hi folks! New member here. I booked the Elegoo Saturn today to do a longish print - about ten hours total. When I arrived tonight to retrieve my prints, I found that someone had canceled the print halfway through, leaving me with a bunch of useless half-finished parts. I had the time booked on Skedda so I’m not sure why someone saw fit to cancel my print and sabotage the job. Can anyone explain? Did I violate some unwritten rule by booking the machine for so long? I burned a lot of time and Uber fare today trying to get these pieces printed, so this is a pretty big disappointment.
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Hi Michael. I’m sorry that happened to you. No, you didn’t violate a rule by booking the machine for ten hours, and nobody should have canceled your print. Is it possible that there was an error, rather than someone deliberately canceling it?
@OctopusDream, have you seen this happen before?
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Thanks Aneel. I should add that I wondered if it was an accident because it seemed pointless - it wasn’t like anyone canceled the print and then put their own print on! It just seems unfortunate, since… ten hours is a long time to kill time in the shop, so it’s just not practical to sit there to guard the machine 
You should not need to guard the machine. People routinely run 3D prints on both the resin and the filament printers that run for many hours (sometimes longer than 24 hours!). The policy for resin printers is to reserve time until you can get back and post-process your print, so the reservations may be even longer.
I have often seen the filament printers paused because of a problem. If the problem is correctable (eg. filament spool got tangled) or resolves itself (eg. overheating), I’ll usually try to fix it and get the printer going again. Sometimes, it’s as easy as pressing the resume button.
I haven’t seen this happen on the resin printers, but that may just be because the resin printers are less heavily used at Asmbly.
It is a good practice to stop a print that is obviously failing (eg. a filament printer is printing spaghetti, or dragging the print around the bed), but I don’t know how you’d notice that on the resin printer.
I’m not aware of any case where a successful print was paused or stopped by a person, rather than the machine stopping because it encountered a problem, so I’d start by assuming that it was some kind of error, rather than someone stopping the print. But we’ll look into this.
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Hey Michael,
Sorry to hear this happened to your print! Like Aneel mentioned, your print definitely shouldn’t be canceled and you don’t need to guard the print, this is the first time this happened on the resin printer, weather it’s caused by machine or human.
What was the LCD displaying when you come back to it? There is a chance that the hardware could stop the print. We’ll get to the bottom of it.
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Hi both. Thanks for weighing in on all this. It was definitely not a hardware issue. The flash drive with my file on it was removed and the print suspended. I used the Elegoo flash drive that goes with the machine - not sure what happened to it, I didn’t really look around. The prints were suspended above the vat, half finished (or less than half finished). It definitely seems like interference with the program was the cause, not a hardware failure.
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That’s odd. I wonder if someone didn’t realize the machine was running and borrowed that flash drive for some other use.
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Again, I wondered if I had violated protocol somehow. I could not figure out how to access the Saturn on the LAN and then spotted the thumb drive plugged into the machine, which I assumed was the proper way to load the print. It seemed to be the thumb drive that went with the machine. Yeah, maybe someone needed it for something else, but there was a pile of drives sitting next to the printer (I assumed these were there for common use - at the shop at my school we literally kept a little cup full of drives next to the printers for this purpose).
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If that particular thumb drive belonged to someone, it should have been clearly labeled with their name. The menagerie of thumb drives there are for general use.
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Yeah, that’s what I assumed! Moreover, I interpreted the drive that was plugged into the machine as the one that came with the machine and was meant for whomever was using the machine to load their files. I mean, I guess it could have been left over from a previous job or whatever, but that didn’t occur to me at the time 
Anyway, I’m just happy to learn this was an anomaly, I’ll come back next weekend and try again if I can.
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Just for clarification, we are allowed to use up to two printers at a time? So if no one has booked either of them, I can use the Mars and Saturn simultaneously? Normally I would avoid doing that but I’d like to see if I can get all the parts I currently need printed in one go.
The policy is that you can book two 3D printers at a time.
Do you have more parts than will fit on the surface area of the Saturn?
Yeah, the main parts that were ruined Saturday were these larger wing components. I had some other parts to print in addition to those. It would be most time efficient to come and set up jobs on both to max the number of parts I could get in one day. I’m happy to do it in two jobs over the next two weekends if you’d prefer me not to tie up both printers though
I think I understand what happened here, and I’d put it down to confusion that arose because the 3D Printer team hasn’t been communicating as well as we should about what hardware is in the space.
Historically we’ve had two printers, an Elegoo Mars 2 Pro (“Mars”) and an Elegoo Saturn 3 Ultra (“Saturn”). But as of a few weeks ago there are three resin printers on the bench, and we didn’t announce what was going on until just now:
Someone booked Mars and thought “the smaller” 3D printer was the one they’d booked. But Saturn looks like the smaller printer next to the new Saturn 4 Ultra. And then someone else, knowing that the first person was done, thought it was okay to remove the USB stick on the “idle” printer.
I’m sorry that your print was disrupted because of our lack of communication.
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Thanks Aneel. So when I look at Skedda, I see Mars, Tethys, and Dione. Mars is specified as the Mars 2 Pro. Skedda does not specify what the others are. Can we get those labeled in Skedda (under the “i” for info at the top of the schedule) to reduce confusion?
Also, the printers are supposed to be visible over the network, right? I couldn’t quite figure this aspect out from inside the slicer, which is why I resorted to using the thumb drive in the first place.
When I came in on Saturday, there were two printers - the smaller Mars and the larger Saturn. My job was on the larger Saturn, which would have been running - indicating that the job was not finished…
There were three printers. Saturn Tethys and Dione were on the main resin workbench, and Mars was next to Poseidon.
Understandably, there was confusion about reservations for Saturn and for Mars. I don’t think anyone on Saturday used the machine that they had reserved!
They have nametags now.
Thanks for pointing out that the Skedda info boxes provided different information. I had honestly never even noticed the 
.
I have not ever personally succeeded in printing from the network.
One of the other printers that day said that by the afternoon, the job on Dione was paused. Perhaps it ran into a problem and the error message was lost when the USB stick was unplugged.
Hmmm… yeah definitely confusing! What I seem to recall was the red printer - the Mars - and the Saturn 3 on the bench last week, but perhaps memory fails. Anyway, thanks for dealing with all this. Definitely helpful to have everything clearly labeled, both on the bench and in Skedda!
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Mars was definitely in the corner on Saturday morning. You can see the red enclosure in this horrible screenshot.
Ah, the surveillance footage! Got it. It was all a bit of a blur. Anyway, thanks for clarifying which machine is which - I’m hoping to give my parts another go this weekend. Thank you!
Hi Aneel!
Per the possibility of the Mars being retired, any chance one of us would be able to snag it, or is it going home with asmbly staff?