M300 doesn't cause beep  

RE: M300 doesn't cause beep

I have the same problem with my upgrades to MK4. I hear the beeps on the MK3s but no sound from the MK4.  In a very thorough chat with support, they had me make videos of the printer not beeping on filament change & menu knob turning. In reviewing the video with the volume turned up I can then, just barely, hear the beeps. 

I believe the problem is that humans slowly lose the ability to hear some higher frequencies as they age and Prusa has chosen higher frequencies for the beeps on the Buddy / XBuddy board driver software. (I don’t hear anything from my XL either). It would be nice if they would lower the frequencies back to those used on the MK3, or allow for frequency choice in settings, as this is also a safety issue when I don't hear a possible error warning sound.

In the mean time, I intend to use the GPIOs, when they finally arrive 😀 , to trigger a separate sound device so I can stop hovering over my printers for MK4 filament changes. (At least there are printer provided time estimates)

RE: M300 doesn't cause beep

Did you send the videos to the PRUSA people you were chatting with? Did they hear the beeps OK, without turning the volume way up?

I am indeed getting old, but haven't had problems with other devices, like my PRUAS Mk3. It would seem pretty weird that they would change the beep frequencies. Did the chat person actually say they had changed them?

My assumption is that it actually is NOT beeping and something is definitely wrong with it.

RE: M300 doesn't cause beep

I did send the vid files thru Prusa chat and they seemed to hear the beeps fine. With the video volume up I can hear the beeps faintly and hear it as a much higher pitch than I hear the MK3 beeps. 

High-frequency hearing loss can start as early as your 20’s, often from exposure to loud noises. It becomes more common the more you age. It can also be quite selective as to which frequencies are affected.

The code base between Einsy vs Buddy are quite different with regard to sound.cpp. it is difficult to tell, without testing on a board, but Buddy seems to be set to beep higher frequencies.

More directly to the M300 issue, I think it is also true that M300 is not currently working as my tests playing M300 tones at lower frequencys also do not seem to be working even when videoed and playback volume turned up.

RE: M300 doesn't cause beep

Oh, wait. I was talking about explicitly doing an M300 GCode within a GCode file, in which I specifically give the frequency and time. I CONTROL the pitch of the sound, and nothing is coming out of the PRUSA. Something is definitely wrong with the MK4 NOT processing the M300 code properly, or at all, apparently.

RE: M300 doesn't cause beep

When I first upgraded from mk3s to mk4 I remember looking this up because I used to put M300 codes in the end code so that the printer would play the imperial march when it was done with a print :p

When I got my mk4, using the same gcodes would not produce any sound at all.

I was told on this forum that the Mk4 board doesn't support M300 codes to produce sound anymore. 🙁 

RE: M300 doesn't cause beep

Thank you for confirming. But, man, that's nuts. Why would anyone at PRUSA even bother to remove the processing of that GCode?? Why would anyone at PRUSA Say, hey, we need to remove M300 processing?

I have thought for a long time that one of the options on PRUSA Slicer should be to automatically append a PRINT DONE sound. You'd select it once in the Settings and then every single GCode file produced by the Slicer would always include it. And now they've made it so you can't even force it to do it with an M300 Gcode.

RE: M300 doesn't cause beep

Posted by: @rogerinhawaii

Thank you for confirming. But, man, that's nuts. Why would anyone at PRUSA even bother to remove the processing of that GCode?? Why would anyone at PRUSA Say, hey, we need to remove M300 processing?

It's more likely that they deleted the buzzer as that would be an extra component on the motherboard.

If you use the Prusa app on your phone it will tell you when the job has finished and you can attach whatever sound you like to the notification

RE: M300 doesn't cause beep

Except that the MK4 still does buzz when it's time to do a filament change, it detects filament out, or overheat and other serious conditions. Plus, there's a Sound Mode option in the User Interface section of Settings , which by default is set to LOUD. So it would seem there still is some kind of physical buzzer.

RE: M300 doesn't cause beep

AFAIR the buzzer is on the display board, same as it is on the MK3.

Now, there are several types of buzzers on the market. Some are just a simple piezo element that needs the modulation to come from a driver of some sort (like the microcontroller), and others had a driver built in and only requires power. The simple ones are the ones you want if you want to be able to control the pitch of the tones, and the others can only make one frequency tone. Using M300 to play tunes requires the simple buzzers. 

I just checked the schematic for the LCD board (found here) and found it calls for a KINGSTATE KMTG1603-1. I found the datasheet for this part on Farnell and it appears to be a simple piezo element that requires a driver to provide a tone. So, the hardware is capable of playing different tones. It is then up to the firmware to decode the M300. Maybe the M300 code got left on the cutting room floor when they were adapting the firmware for the 32bit processor?

RE: M300 doesn't cause beep

I dont think its a hearing problem. Some people have this issue and some don't. Just so happens in my case I've updated two mk3s's to mk4s. Both are set to loud. But I only hear one of them. Curiously the one that doesn't beep also had heat bed calibration issues on 1st setup, but since calibrated fine. 

RE: M300 doesn't cause beep

Ignore my post above, thought post was about sound in general not specifically the M300 command.