Here at Cosine, we have a diverse array of customers from different industries. More often than not, we have found that our customers do not want their printer to be connected to the internet because of security or intellectual property (IP) concerns. This presents a problem for us when it comes time to troubleshoot issues because remoting into the printer and diagnosing the problem is not possible. We instead have to tell the customers what files to email to us.
To help account for this issue, we created what we call Enhanced Debugging Tools. These tools are used in a couple of different spots in our software. The first being the Export Error Logs button. All this button does is create a zip file of the two error logs (one for the Dashboard and one for the CosineAdditiveService). This is a very simple but valuable tool because half the time when an issue occurs, it is caught and logged in one of those error logs. Another tool is the ability to export information surrounding a specific print. When print issues occur, we have customers send over the post processed print file to help us determine the cause of the problem. To simplify this process, we created a checkbox in the Print History tab and a corresponding button in that tab, so the customer can select which prints they are having trouble with and then hit the button to export the information. There are a couple of different things that get exported during this process. The first is the post-processed print file, as mentioned before. Second is the truncated error logs that only contain errors that occurred during the time that the print was running. Finally, information about the selected material and a log of all database communication during the time the print was running. As mentioned before, some customers have IP or security concerns, which means that sometimes they cannot send us the actual print they are having trouble with. We have accounted for this as well by having a popup when they go to export the prints that asks if they want to include geometry or not. If they don’t want to include geometry (which is essentially the main part of the print) then the outputted file would just contain the header comments which shows us things like what slicer and machine settings they are using.
The combination of these tools helps immensely in cutting down the time it takes to troubleshoot an issue. Previously, the manual process for collecting information from offline printers was tedious and prone to error. These new tools help automate that process and decrease our turnaround time when resolving issues. Here at Cosine, we strive to provide a quality service for a quality product, and this is just one more step towards that goal.
