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Hi,

I am having problems with the prints stopping in it's tracks about halfway into a print.

I felt like sometimes it would be like someone hit the reset button, and the heaters would turn off. This most recent event, the print just "paused" in place and the heaters stayed on.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Mo
http://www.LAFilament.com

If you are printing from the computer, it sounds like the computer is going into standby/sleep and causing the print to be interrupted.

The data being sent to the printer is not an activity that will keep the computer awake. Eventually the computer sleeps and the printer runs out of commands to execute. The printer firmware has a safety feature to turn off the heaters after a certain period if no commands are received.

Particularly for long prints, I prefer to print from the SD card.

I thought this was a problem as well. I have begun printing directly from the SD card to mitigate this and it's happened at least once.

Thanks,
Mo

What version of the firmware are you running?

0.91

There was an issue I. 0.8x that did exactly that, but it's fixed in 0.9x
If you use Repetier host as your host software you can turn logging on, and at least see what if any errors were thrown before it stopped.
Computers sleeping usually happens a lot earlier.
If you are printing from SD card, but still have the USB cable plugged in, a computer sleeping can cause the issue.

Thanks, I'll keep a closer eye on it.

Its not just the computer going to sleep, any random usb error will cause a print to fail. I never print with any printers plugged in, always a big risk of wasting time and filament.

JFettig wrote:Its not just the computer going to sleep, any random usb error will cause a print to fail. I never print with any printers plugged in, always a big risk of wasting time and filament.

I agree 100% with this statement.

I've run 20+ hour prints from a computer without issues. You just have to disable the power save options.
Any USB error will not cause it to fail, there is a checksum sent with every line, and retry logic in the firmware. If the device disconnects for any reason then yes that will cause it to fail, but that should only happen on sleep/suspend.
I used to run everything from SD card, but most of the time I can't be bothered.

I am leaning towards a hardware issue at this point (loose connection, etc).

For the issue of a computer going into sleepmode and stopping a print... on my iMAC (which is how I print), I use the app, Caffeine.
It places a little coffee cup icon at the top of my screen and I can select it anytime to override sleep mode.
I can change the settings to: Indefinite, or 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes, or 1, 2, 5 hours.
Much easier than going into settings all the time. Once I'm done printing, I just roll up to the top of the screen and unclick the coffee cup (kinda cute... it fills with coffee when active and empties when not)