Printer stops moving (keeps extruding)
Hi,
I've seen a bunch of times now that my printer (MK3S) will stop moving mid-print (well, luckily closer to the start, when I was still around). The filament keeps coming, so it ends up just making a "blob" at that spot and/or pushing that around if it ever continues.
Printed tests from the SD card is fine (frogs & logo), but when I'm trying to print is [this model], I run into trouble. I've tried two different PETG filaments and a PLA test, from 15 - 100% infill (trying to do somewhere between 50 - 100%, they need to carry a lot of weight).
PLA seems better (but not good!). It still stops, but not for as long, and not as much filament is extruded. It then makes some weird "rings" as it slowly moves along with/through the extra extruded filament. Also, the timer doesn't count down when it's stopped (but does when it seems to be running normally). Because the pre-loaded models (that I've tried) seem to work, I'm guessing that it's something I'm doing wrong in the slicing/printing.
I'm slicing in PrusaSlicer 2.1.0, and printing from Pronterface. Everything from a Mac running OS X 10.14.6. See image (grey is PLA, the other two are PETG): https://ibb.co/CW8gKKn. You can see it near the bottom left corner of each (as well as other places for PLA).
Any ideas are welcome (I should note that this is the first non-test item I've tried printing, so sorry if it's something stupid; I couldn't find a solution when googling).
RE: Printer stops moving (keeps extruding)
Don't print from Pronterface...
Seriously, look at OctoPrint. It avoids all transmission problems from the PC.
RE: Printer stops moving (keeps extruding)
I'm not familiar at all with Apple computers but I have a small bench top CNC router that I run from a Windows laptop. Before I reconfigured the power settings on the laptop to stay awake it would cause me a great deal of difficulty when the laptop would go into sleep mode while the router was cutting. Not sure if Macs do the same thing but I would suggest that you load your sliced model to your SD card and try printing the same code from there and see what you get?
RE: Printer stops moving (keeps extruding)
Don't use pronterface. It doesn't respect "busy" and still keeps querying temperatures. This can insert bad M-codes into the planner buffer, as observed in https://github.com/prusa3d/Prusa-Firmware/issues/2105
RE: Printer stops moving (keeps extruding)
I put the Mac in "Stay awake" mode, but I was planning on setting up OctoPi anyway. I just couldn't get it to show up on the WiFi when using the guides here, here, and on OctoPrint website. The Pi works fine, setting up Buster Lite headless, it connects to the WiFi. So I used Pronterface to just get going while figuring out the Pi issues.
I'll try hooking up a screen and a keyboard, and do it the initial OctoPi setup through that.
Thanks for the suggestions!