I’m at a sticking point in my troubleshooting that hopefully someone here can help. I have a Printrbot Plus that now suddenly stops during prints. I am printing from SD card and have tried multiple files multiple times with each one stopping mid print (one after 30 seconds, one after 10 minutes, and everything between). I found a cut wire on the heated bed which I repaired thinking there may be a random short but all the prints I was attempting did not utilize the heated bed and even after the repair the system still froze. Restarting the electronics brings everything back up and running. Any suggestions?
Do you have a display that keeps shows you the temperature of the extruder in real-time during a print?
Yes, among other things (including time). When the printer pauses the time count halts as well.
Is the printer board getting hot? A small fan blowing across it would eliminate that possibility. Also, if you found a cut wire, I would go through all of the wiring and make sure everything is tight. I had an intermittent bed heater that was caused by a loose connection…
Try disconnecting heater to see if there is still a short. Sounds like something is shorting and killing the print. Is the thermistor shorting? Check that it is insulated. Unplug bed thermistor too to test.
This is weird since it happens at different times. Try printing something long and thin laid across the X axis to check if there is a short happening in X. Then try rotating it to work out the y axis and see if there is a short there.
Printing from sd card with usb unplugged to rule that out.
Look to see if you can repeat the same failure on the same print at different times in the print. That would be really strange.
If all else fails, go through each motor and wire and visually check each one. Make sure wires are no under any strain or rubbing against anything sharp.
Assembled or kit?
Thanks everyone for the suggestions, I will try to work on testing those options tonight. @Keith_Applegarth I haven’t checked the board (it is in an enclosure under the printer so not too easy to check). @Brook_Drumm Thanks for your quick response, it is a kit so I have no problems with taking it apart and playing around. It worked great for the past couple of months which is why I’m so puzzled.
Let me know how it goes and how we can help. Our customer support guys are really good and share an office with me. We have smart people in engineering too to get answers from. It sounds like a wiring issue but your investigation should turn up more info
Try to change sd card…
I have similar issues with a ramps with lcd. In my case it is because the wires connecting the lcd are getting worn out (it’s loose) and the sd card slot is also wearing out. I just haven’t had time to rewire the ribbons yet. It could be a bad solder point or trace.
So I took my printer apart, inspected all the cables (no obvious problem) and disconnected/reconnected all the cables from the Printrboard to the LCD/SD unit. Funny thing is, the moment I started my first test print started…my power went out. I had to spend the next 5 minutes convincing my wife I hadn’t blown all the breakers in the house at once.
This morning my power was back on and I did a quick run. My 15 min print that had failed before now completed successfully. Based on what I saw last night I think either the cable for the SD card connection or for the LDC got loose from the Printrboard side and the little vibrations from printing was interrupting the communication. I obviously need to keep testing but thank you all for your suggestions and quick response.
@Nicolas_Duarte Been there! Good luck.
A wiring short will cause a brown out in the supply… It takes a couple minutes for it to reset itself. If you found the short and corrected it, you are good to go
Looks like I spoke too soon…but it seems the answer is weirder than any of us thought. I got to play with it some more tonight and had another two prints fail in the middle. I have been trying to optimize my ooze and stringing following the suggestions in this document (https://www.matterhackers.com/articles/retraction-just-say-no-to-oozing). I didn’t think much of it but I now realize I had problems when I set my retraction above 3mm. At 3.5mm is when I had all the pausing, and when I got up to 4mm I had the extruder stepper go haywire about 2 min into the print (it just wobbled back and forth, restarting fixed the problem though). On a whim I decided to set the retraction back down to 2mm and now I have a fully functioning print (albeit with oozing and stringing). I’m going to try to optimize the oozing from increasing the retraction speed now but it just seems really odd that the retraction distance would cause such a problem.
Other information that might be relevant:
Using Cura for slicing
I tried a new SD card (currently I am printing from USB but that failed once before).
What slicer are you using? Sounds like a bug in the slicer. Try the same model with another slicer using 3.5 retraction. I use slic3r. If the problem goes away, it’s software.
I have been using Cura but I have been tempted to move back to slic3r since that is what I used on my first reprap build. I’ll try that asap.