I was printing something I sliced with Slic3r. At the 4th layer, printing shifted over a few millimeters. Has this happened to you?
I put the same mode in Cura without changing anything and it is printing fine.
When I see a shift partway through, I generally assume the head hit something during the print and lost some steps, so it was no longer in the position it should have been.
Oh my word, so many times… as John Bump said, the head likely bumped into a blob of cooled print that was higher than expected.
…however…
It is possible that the stepper motor drivers are driving just enough current, but over longer prints skip when they all call for current at the same time because they are set a bit low.
How much printing have you done on this printer?
I don’t think that honeycomb infill pattern helps preventing this kind of mishap. The only thing honeycomb is good for, is stress-testing your printer.
It is not stronger than normal diagonal infill.
I had this issue the other day. Some wires got jammed and it caused the print head to skip. Looked pretty much just like this.
To add to what @Mr_Bonce said, I recently put a cooling fan in my (commercial, but cheap) printer’s electronics bay because I was worried by how hot the drivers were getting. I wasn’t having skipping problems, but now the drivers seem to be much cooler so I should in theory be able to run them faster.
This could also be a combination of your jerk and acceleration settings with the way the model got sliced causing your motors to skip a few steps. Hot motors are more prone to skipping. A different slicer may have approached a given piece of geometry differently such that the motion of the head didn’t generate the skip. Sometimes rotating the piece 45 degrees will split the motion between the two axis and avoid the problem. Or, as in your case slice it with a different slicer. You can also print slower or turn down your jerk and acceleration settings a little.
your hotend probably got caught while moving over the infill, and the stepper lost steps. Probably the large area warped up a bit ? Try to improve bed adhesion and maybe increase motor current for x and y a little.
Cura does a different infill pattern, so maybe you got lucky there.
B Once - I have been using this printer since January 2017.
There weren’t any high points on the print when this happened. Usually, when the hot end on my printer hits a high end it just bumps over it. This is the first time I have ever seen it shift the printing over. I thought something was wrong with my design until I it worked with Cura.
yes, your design be is never at fault in these situations. It is all between the slicer and printer at that point. Maybe slic3r over extruded a bit?
Ok, so I think what you could really do with knowing is if this is likely to happen again?
I think it’s likely to be a good idea to run the original Slic3r print again and watch like a hawk when it’s likely to fail again.
That way if it does fail you can quickly look at all the things:
Are the motors hot?
Are the drivers hot?
Is there a visible blob that will be covered up on subsequent passes that the head bumped into?
Is there a evil gremlin hiding behind the power supply, poking the head when your not looking?
Has the serial console got some garbage in it?
Has something really unexpected happened?
Personally I’d definitely want to know, nothing worse than a unexplained intermittent issue, especially with a 3d printer, means I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving it running a long print without supervision.
Oh, you bring up a good point, @Mr_Bonce : I only ever print off sdcard because I’m afraid a hiccup on my computer will lead to a glitch being sent to the 3d printer. That’s almost impossible to troubleshoot because it’s likely to not happen again for days, and when it does, it’ll happen in a completely different place.
It’s not slic3r nor Cura. It’s something in your printer. (FYI, I’m the guy behind Cura, kinda know my thing here)
We’ve had the same reports the other way around, where a certain model prints fine with Slic3r but people reports shifts with Cura. It always boils down to the fact that Cura or Slic3r is requesting something from the printer that pushes it beyond it’s limits. Which can happen randomly within a specific model.
These limits could also have changed between January and now, due to wear/lack of lube.
I’m going with the gremlin in the power supply : )
… and as always with Gremlins and power supplies: don’t pour water on it.
This has happened to me in cura…but I still use it because its probably the best free software
Check your bearings for smooth action. I had a very small shift on some prints that turned out to be a seized bearing ball. A few drops of oil and the problem disappeared.
Jeff Parish - I oiled the bearings last week. The print with Cura gcode went without incident. However, I had neglected them before then.
Ahh, that may have been the change to make the difference. Bet it works with the other slicer now.
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