Turn off your mini after every print if controlled serially
Folks,
I've been tearing my hear out for about a year trying to isolate the source of a random serial disconnection while running under OctoPrint/OctoFarm.
This month, I finally had the time/clarity to run a couple of tests to isolate it, and I have it.
Symptom: You walk up to your mini, frozen, heaters on. Inspection of octoprint logs shows "requesting line XXXX" over and over again, with octoprint giving up and closing the connection.
Test 1: 100 print run on 16 machines over 7 days, 50MB per print GCODE file, no power cycles between prints. Pi power remains on regardless.
Result: Day 1-4 100% effective. Day 5, 1 machine drop. Day 6, 2 machines drop. Day 7, 4 machines drop. 93% effective otherwise.
Test 2: 100 print run on 16 machines over 7 days, this time with a power cycle ("PortLister" plugin used for quality of life) after every completed print. All other conditions are the same.
Result: Day 7, 100th print completed without a single disconnection. 100% effective.
I think there may be a memory leak somewhere in the serial parsing/handling of the 4.3.2 firmware (and all prior revs.)
Anyways, I thought I'd share for anyone else that does a lot of printing and has encountered this seemingly random bug.
Hmm
Hmm,
I have not seen this but I am probably not [rinting at your volume. I will try what you are doing and see what happens. I have all 5ive of my minies on octofarm and octoprint. How long of a print?
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Chuck H
3D Printer Review Blog
Interesting. I have seen random disconnects in the middle of a print on both Minis and Mk3S. Nothing in the logs was helpful. I pretty much never power cycle them. Maybe I should start doing so.
Formerly known on this forum as @fuchsr -- until all hell broke loose with the forum software...
File and Print Durations
Hmm,
I have not seen this but I am probably not [rinting at your volume. I will try what you are doing and see what happens. I have all 5ive of my minies on octofarm and octoprint. How long of a print?
File sizes were around 50MB, and print times range between 12-15 hours each print. Some machines would drop out on the 5th print, some the 6th or 7th. I couldn't narrow it down to a specific duration or total MB count as I wasn't there to hack which line the prints had failed. Days 1 through 4 (basically prints 1 - 4) showed no problems for the entire rack.
I don't want to track which print each printer is on, so I decided just to power cycle after each and make it part of the harvest routine. It adds about 3 seconds to each harvest, but OctoPrint automatically reconnects with PortLister so it's not too inconvenient.
Question
Any particular plugins installed?
I have the perfect print that I need to print for a customer so I will print 20-30 copies to sell on line.
--------------------
Chuck H
3D Printer Review Blog
Keep it simple
I run RPi 3B+ with wifi & bluetooth disabled (rfkill block wifi/bluetooth). All on static IPs , with 2 hubs back to a 16 port GB managed network switch for the paths for any 1 printer in the army. Closed network airgapped from the outside.
Octoprint plugins: PrintTimeGenius, PrintHistory, and PortLister. I'm still running octopi-buster-lite-0.17.0 image on all, as I froze the config about a year ago. It has been so stable, and I got sick of fiddling with the network every time an update came down.