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Started a long print this afternoon, large hollow pyramid. All looked good, print was going ok, I left the machine going towards the end of the print and came back to find incomplete print. MatterControl Touch sent me an email and text saying the print completed, but it didn't. LCD on the machine says "killed" and bed and nozzle temps show "def"? I have no clue what that means. Any insights? See attached pictures.
Thanks,

Dan

Looks like a thermister failed or shorted or wire broke.

Yeah, DEF means bad news for one of your temp circuits. When there's a fault, the firmware shuts down the heat for safety and goes into "dry run" mode where the motors still spin, but there's no heat or extrusion... Matter Control kept feeding the GCode, and the machine kept moving as instructed, so the completed print text that you got was accurate as far as Matter Control knew.

Check the connection to the hot-end thermistor. That's the one that's moving during a print, and 9 times out of 10 that's where something came loose.

Ouch, that's gonna be tough to troubleshoot since after it croaked I turned it off/on and ran both the bed and hotend up to temp without issue. Means I got a loose connection "somewhere", joy:(

I have a question though that someone may know. I saved the output window info before rebooting, would that give any clues, or does it just show what's being sent to the printer?

Dan

Not really the big indicator is the word def on the LCD where the temperature should be, it means that the thermistor on either the bed or the nozzle read our of range at some point, either a short, or an open circuit is the typical cause. It also does it if the temperature exceeds the max set in the firmware, but that's much less likely.

Had another fail mid print with same error last night, then one today where it just stopped in one spot and shutdown. The one where it shutdown the nozzle temp read 10.8C whereas the bed was still reading room temperature (it was already cooled when I found it). when I homes the arms the temp jumped back to room temp. So it's pretty obvious to me that I've got an intermittent open somewhere, most likely right at the hotend where all the action happens. Will take it apart and see what I find.

Dan

Fix that before you print again! thermister issues are known to start fires....
http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?392,375707

Yes, fire hazard, understood. Started taking it apart tonight, haven't found anything obvious yet. Will probably replace thermistor and its wiring as a precaution before proceeding. Could be a bad solder joint in one of my plugs, I use soldered connectors at my hotend. Actually rethinking that and may move connectors up on top of the machine. Hopefully I'll find something definitive, if not I'll replace everything top down to hotend. Thanks for the help!

Dan

When I got my E3D, the cartridge heater wires were plenty long that I actually put my connectors at the top. its very clean that way. I'd only do it different if I swapped hot ends frequently, even then, I might make an umbilical for each hot end.

During disassembly I found the culprit. Bad solder joint on my thermistor plug. The micro Deans connector I used for this plug can be a beast to solder, especially when you can't see very well like me(glasses are never handy when I need 'em, ha!). Anyways the wire popped free during disassembly, heat shrink was most likely holding it together. Love it when I can find a nice hard fault like that without rewiring the World:-) Have new everything on order, so if this doesn't fix it I'll be prepared.

Dan

It's printing like a champ now. I must have printed 7-8 things today and the only failures were my fault. I've just been popping parts off, reprinting right on old hairspray that I put on this morning when I first started. Probably clean and reapply before tomorrows printing challenge:) Think maybe some of my failures that didn't error out were possibly caused by erratic hot end temps, possible?

Dan

Congratulations on finding the problem and getting it fixed.
Great job!

Ok so I think I've seen the word "Killed" on my printer twice. If I recall correctly, both times were during incomplete prints due to the extruder stepper overheating and chewing up the the filament? Would that make sense or are they independent events and I have something wrong in a temp circuit?

If the printer sits idle for some period of time (maybe 20 minutes) it runs the "kill" routine, which shuts off the steppers and heaters. It is not a trouble indicator.

At least that is my understanding of the "killed" message. So if you saw it and the machine had failed to complete a print because an of extruder issue, the machine ran all the g-code and thought is was printing. It got to the end of the file and the idle timer started. 20 minutes later, it shut off motors and heaters (which may have already been commanded off by g-code...) and shows the "killed" message.

Thanks for the quick reply! Huge relief.