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Solved Problem 2: Firmware stopped responding

Discussion in 'Troubleshooting' started by David Carter, May 29, 2017.

  1. David Carter

    David Carter Member

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    Unfortunately I have no debugging information for this beyond the error message reported above.

    I was about 18 hours into a 28 hour print and things were going well. All of a sudden things stopped with the above error message. When I disconnected and reconnected, things worked fine but of course I lost my print.

    Obviously a print this long consumes a lot of plastic and a lot of time. I'm not about to restart until I'm sure this is unlikely to happen again.
     
  2. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    Usually a bad USB cable.
    How are you printing? Via USB or from an SD card in an LCD controller?
     
  3. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    and by "bad USB cable" I don't mean "dead" I mean one that is noisy. The cheaper ones are the worst offenders. The printer pushes a lot of data at the highest practical baud rate over the cable to the Arduino and a noisy cable will nuke you.
     
  4. David Carter

    David Carter Member

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    USB. Why would a cable go bad after 18 hours and then be ok when I reconnect?
     
  5. David Carter

    David Carter Member

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    Noisy seems wrong too. I've been using the same cable for almost 2 years. I'll try changing the cable but I'm honestly doubtful
     
  6. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    Again, it is not a "broken" cable.
    Just one that the shielding is not up to par.
    It may work many times or it may fail... Most USB devices don't "talk" as much as the printer does. So a sub-par cable can work fine on (for example) a keyboard or a mouse.

    We have seen this happen many times. While short of having the printer to play with I couldn't swear that it is the cable, I would bet it is. The alternative is an Arduino board going bad and that is rare.
     
  7. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    The error message simply means that the host program you are printing from could not maintain communications with the printer while printing.. (timed-out talking to it) so that is either glitchy communications because of a poor cable or the Arduino is starting to flake out.
     
  8. Geof

    Geof Volunteer Moderator
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    alot of people that dont upgrade to a LCD controller also use a USB powered hub between the computer and the printer (helps some from what I hear)
     
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  9. David Carter

    David Carter Member

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    This appears to be a USB issue but not the cable. I swapped out the cable for a higher quality shielded cable. Over time, things degraded even further. Suspecting the computer's USB port I switched to the next port over. Same result. However when I switched to using my lap top things worked fine.

    The port in question uses an internal connector inside the case that is looking to be the source of the problem. I haven't opened it up yet but I'm content to mark this as solved.
     
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  10. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    A hub might have solved it.
    Good work nailing it down.
     

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