Partially Solved Robo Freezing in mid print

So into a 7 hour print my Robo just froze,The stepper motors were released so I could move everything freely and the extruder and heated bed kept its temperature. I am printing from SD using the XXL LCD screen using S3D for my slicer. Any ideas what could have caused this?

The printer is on legs and the fan cooling the RAMPS board is running so I don't think it could be overheating.

Any ideas? Pretty bummed a 7 hour print and half a roll of filament went out the door.

Thanks for the help!

 

Ok ill keep an eye on it. I turned the printer off and back on and its back to printing normal. Im hoping its just a bad SD card. Ill swap that out and see if that helps. This was a first that its done that so it could of been a bad gcode file.

Thanks for the help!

 

Thanks guys for the help. Ill watch it and see if it happens again and report back.

 

fun story.. I have an olde fashioned florescent lamp plugged into the same power strip as my printer, sitting near my printer.
Its one of those old lamps that has a little starter in it. Have to hold the red button for a couple seconds before you release and it comes on.
Anyway, the power drain (unlikely) or "radio/frequency" interference (more likely) causes my printer to act the heck up. Starting that lamp mid print is a guaranteed failure. Ends up like what you said. It just stops, or stops in a certain funny way. I ought to go move that lamp now.

 

THIS!!!!!! I am so glad you said this! I had my Macbook sitting within a foot of the LCD controller and the minute I opened up a PDF the printer froze. I had to check to make sure I didn't have it connected Via USB. I have been thinking about this all day if this could of been what happened.

 

quite plausible. The robo is quite a noisy machine. Those boards may be at tolerance for radio interference/induction.

Remember back in the day, you'd be watching broadcast TV via rabbit ears... and then Dad goes out to mow the lawn...
you get stripes all over the tv; and that's just one magneto and a few inches of wire.
well.. maybe.

 

enclosure V2... COPPER SCREEN!

yea.. stepper motors and those motor controllers are like radio beacons.

 

wouldn't that indicate that they're actually in a similar band?

 

I was just thinking that the self generated frequencies feeding around the wiring would get amplified to damaging levels with constructive interference from other sources. Its a problem we have with some radios at work, in relation to engine/avionics noise. But as I've said before... took the lazy route, went into management... I'm not as savvy as I once was.

 

I'm an engineer at a semiconductor design center, and I've been spending the last couple of weeks designing a test rig to evaluate the EMI emissions of one of our latest parts. I needed to make a PCB that will run off of a single 12V battery and create all of the power rails needed to power the chip, yet make everything as clean as possible.

We'll stick everything into a shielded container except the chip and the output lines, then take it to an EMI testing facility and measure the results with different configurations and PCB trace lengths on the output. It's a huge issue, dealing with stray EMI.

Even when we're doing normal bench testing, sometimes it's very difficult to figure out if our part's performance is being gated by itself or other things in the environment.

One of the craziest things I've had to deal with was the occupancy detector in our lab. We were doing tests with a digital microphone, and kept getting strange peaks in our audio band spectrums. It took us a while to figure out it was due out-of-band audio tones screaming out of the detector on the ceiling mixing with our test tones. You wouldn't guess it, since the sound frequency from the detector is well out of the human hearing range, but those things are LOUD!