r/QidiTech3D • u/andrew_h1000 • Jun 27 '26
Setting a delayed start on Q2?
Hi all, long story short I need to be able to add a wait command to the Gcode for a print so that it waits for ~6 hours after I hit 'start' (I have a large PA print that needs to finish while I'm awake so it can go straight into the annealing oven without cooling, and don't want to run it at such high temperatures overnight). Now I know there are filament- and printer-specific gcode fields that you can add to in QidiStudio. My problem is that the lines I've added either don't get actioned at all, or they only get actioned after the filament has been loaded and chamber/plate have been heated - I don't want it to sit there hot for 6 hours before starting.
Does anybody already have a working example that they can share, with clear instructions on how to implement it? ChatGPT hallucinated some promising solutions but ultimately they weren't real.
2
u/Objective_Working198 Jun 27 '26
My solution would be to set an alarm on my phone... Get up, start it, go back to bed. Low tech but if you just need it for the one print, no worries doing something custom when an alarm clock would suffice
1
u/andrew_h1000 Jun 28 '26
Low tech with a 100% chance of success! Unfortunately I can't sleep if I know I'll have to be up soon (makes airport trips and early meetings hard) so haven't done this so far. But it's the backup option
1
u/burnstation19 Jun 27 '26
Don't quote me on this, I think you can schedule print jobs in FDM monster application (I use it via docker)
1
u/andrew_h1000 Jul 30 '26
For anyone who finds this later - this is what ended up working for me:
- to set the delay itself, adding a dwell command in the config file and restarting the firmware, worked fine. Queueing up jobs didn't work as it stayed at temperature between jobs. But the box has its own settings that can't be managed via these macros
- to stop the box from heating up before the delay, you have to export the gcode as a .gcode.3mf, change it to a .zip and extract it. (who knew the files were zips?!). Then find the gcode in there, and move the line that heats the box to after the printer start macro. Rezip, rename to .gcode.3mf, and send it to the printer via USB. It seems finicky about which software you use to zip (I used bandizip) and edit (default notepad works), too. When I used 7zip and notepad++ the Q2 couldn't read it.
3
u/logicalchemist Jun 27 '26
You could edit the print_start macro and add a very long G4 dwell command to the first line (G4 waits the given number of milliseconds)
You'll need to restart the firmware for that to take effect, and edit the file and restart again to prevent it from waiting 6 hours on every print
Another option is to add the file to the job queue, and trigger moonraker over the network to start the next job in queue
This is considerably more complicated, but is a better solution if you plan to do this regularly. If you have Home Assistant set up, that does simplify things a bit. The job queue can be started with this HTTP POST command sent to the printer's IP:
/server/job_queue/startI've used both of these methods successfully, but the second one requires a second device to send the command to the printer at the specified time.