Smoothieboard lag/unresponsive

Controllers Smoothie
1

We recently swapped out our Sanguinololu boards for Smoothieboards for our 3D printers and have been having an issue with the new boards randomly lagging/becoming unresponsive mid prints. It seems to happen randomly both when printing and also when moving manually. If I move the z-axis up and down repeatedly eventually it will just stop responding, and then maybe a minute later it will send through the commands and it will move again.

At first we thought it was a USB issue due to what many people were saying on the forums, so we swapped out the USB for ethernet and after a couple of days got it working with our software. However it is still doing it.

Is anyone familiar specifically with this issue who can tell me what we need to do to fix it? I’d really appreciate replies from those who have actually had this problem before as it seems there are many users on the forums just guessing as to what it might be and so far it has cost us a lot of time and money on wild goose chases.

Cheers

Imported from wikidot

2

I have never heard of an issue like this.

What host are you using to talk to smoothie?

Try a console and see if it still lags. My guess there is something wrong with the host you are using not being able to talk to smoothie properly.

3

Sorry I know nothing about software. Not sure what a host or a console is but we use a Java based program our developer made.

We are using NEMA23 motors with the board though which are rated at 3A. In the Smoothie config file I have changed the z-axis (gamma) to 2A as that is apparently all the boards can handle. The drivers are too hot to touch after a while. Could this be causing it to stop?

4

Can you try using Pronterface, and see if the problem happens with Pronterface too, please ?

Thanks.