Idea or suggestion...

[SPlatten]

I've been 3D printing for a few year now, I have a QIDITECH dual extruder. I'm very pleased with the printer and the quality, however one thing I'm surprised at is the amount of filament that is wasted.

Its not a problem that is exclusive to my printer, the way in which most printers are fed filament is via a reel of filament, its highly unlikely that you will ever print a model that uses exactly all the filament on the reel and then you are left with filament the isn't enough to print with.

Has this problem already been addressed and solved? I find myself often having to remove reals and replace with new reals only to have to throw out the reals the have filament left but isn't enough for use.

It would be great if the software could pause during a print, reload filament without aborting the print and then continue, but as far as I know there is no such option.

[curious aardvark]

there should be a pause print option from the printers control panel. I have 5 printers with 5 different firmwares and they all have a pause option.

[SPlatten]

Yes, I have a pause and resume option too, and that works if pausing and resuming is all you want to do, but can you pause, then reload filament, then resume printing? On the QidiTech you can't.

[curious aardvark]

Ah good point, that is one drawback of a direct drive extruder.

have you tried sort of daisy chaining operations.
Say, pause the print then go to the load/inload filament option. Change, then go back to the pause print menu and resume printing ?

It's got to be worth a try :-)

Failing that just split the stl vertically.
print the first part, change filament and then print the second half starting where the first one ends.
You'll have to be careful where you place the print to avoid the head crashing into it when you start the second print. But some gcode could probably get round that.

What firmware are you running ?

[SPlatten]

Thats the problem, as far as I'm aware, once you paused the print there is no way to resume printing once you load filament. I'm printing atm, will check firmware later.