Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
I just received my Prusa core one assembled printer but it looks like DPD lived up to their namesake Dropped Parcel Deliveries and managed to rip open the box and have lost the included flash drive.
Can I ask what was on this? and can I download anything important which was on this.
thanks
Normal people believe that if it is not broke, do not fix it. Engineers believe that if it is not broke, it does not have enough features yet.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
Everything else looks OK, some plastic clips for the Perspex missing but no dents, or obvious visible damage. Will take a good look later when I am less busy.
Normal people believe that if it is not broke, do not fix it. Engineers believe that if it is not broke, it does not have enough features yet.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
It just had the firmware (make sure you get the one for the core one currently 6.3.0) and some test prints. You can download those separately though my searching is failing me at the moment. There are a few of the prints on printables. The engine and scraper the benchy and lighthouse (I can't find this one offhand). If you'd like shoot me a message and I'll pm you an image file from when I imaged my USB drive. They are known to fail pretty quickly but they aren't really important and easily replaced with a more reliable usb drive.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
OK thanks, nothing important then, that's a relief. I use those plastic razor blades in a holder for removing prints so no need to print one, and don't need to waste filament on things I'm not going to have a use for and mainly print in petg so not sure what I will use the included prusament for, guess for initial calibration checks etc will also need to get that brass nozzle changed out, pity nickel plated copper is not available as petg sticks to brass something rotten.
Thanks again Taubin.
Normal people believe that if it is not broke, do not fix it. Engineers believe that if it is not broke, it does not have enough features yet.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
No worries, the only important thing is the firmware. You'll need that on a USB formatted in fat32 when you first boot up the printer.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
Tried this and it doesn't work, is there a particular filename ie firmware.bbf or a folder or a size limit on the drive?
Normal people believe that if it is not broke, do not fix it. Engineers believe that if it is not broke, it does not have enough features yet.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
OK Panic over, needed a smaller usb drive. firmware flashed
Normal people believe that if it is not broke, do not fix it. Engineers believe that if it is not broke, it does not have enough features yet.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
Tried this and it doesn't work, is there a particular filename ie firmware.bbf or a folder or a size limit on the drive?
Just in case someone runs into this in the future, there is a 32gb size limit for fat32 formatting in Windows.
I'm glad you got it sorted though!
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
They are known to fail pretty quickly
Ah. Like with the Mk4S USB this is not the best of devices ? It seemed to fail more often than any other USB drive.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
It's probably the same USB as those included with the Mk4s
They do seem to be extremely failure prone so I imaged and replaced mine pretty quick. Apparently one of the signs of it failing can be shifted prints.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
Hopefully ordered a working new USB drive to be able to use PrusaLink as my Sandisk drives don't seem to be recognised even at 16Gb size.
Currently using the drive that came with my computer mobo.
The new drive is a small drive so it hopefully doesn't stick out too far.
Arriving tomorrow so will post if it works or not
Normal people believe that if it is not broke, do not fix it. Engineers believe that if it is not broke, it does not have enough features yet.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
Good luck, I have found most of those provided with motherboards or other electronics are the cheapest they can get and not very good.
SanDisk makes pretty good drives usually. Just make sure you format it in fat32 not ntfs if you're using windows. It defaults to ntfs.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
I can recommend SanDisk Ultra Fit drives. They are from SanDisk and they are small. Perfect for that control panel.
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You can use larger than 32GB USB drives, as long as they are formatted as FAT32. Windows is unable to format drivers larger then 32GB as FAT32, so you need to use a 3rd party tool such as Rufus to format larger drives.
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I ended up buying a 16GB Microdrive for just £4.29 which works a treat, no point in spending loads on a super large and fast drive when this does and is small enough to be unobtrusive yet can be grabbed and pulled out if needed to. (The USB socket is very tight on this printer)
I'm using PrusaLink for uploading print files to the printer, so the drive will remain plugged into the printer.
Normal people believe that if it is not broke, do not fix it. Engineers believe that if it is not broke, it does not have enough features yet.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
Does the Prusa firmware write to the USB stick frequently? (or at all?) Assuming that I don't capture video, will it use the USB drive to record log files, or to store any intermediate files?
I struggle to imagine that any USB stick -- even a very cheap one -- could be worn out in a matter of months via read cycles only. On the other hand, even a sloppy implementation of a FAT32 library should not be able to create any data inconsistencies as long as it only reads from the file system. Nevertheless, USB stick failures seem to be somewhat common with Prusa printers. Any ideas what might be going on there?
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
I wonder if people are deleting the files once printed in effect feeing up the space again and this space is then written to again and again so in effect it is always the same flash area which is used over and over.
If this is the case, then leave all existing prints and just keep adding to the drive until it gets full, only then delete everything and start the process again, this way you use all the flash memory. I highly doubt that wear levelling is implemented in these usb drives.
Normal people believe that if it is not broke, do not fix it. Engineers believe that if it is not broke, it does not have enough features yet.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
The one USB drive failure I had was after hitting the RESET button to recover from a filament loading error. That was when my printer was only a couple of weeks old. I wish I knew how many others failed during a RESET vs all other conditions. My hypothesis is that when the RESET occurs while writing to the drive, it gets corrupted.
I wish Prusa would just get rid of the RESET button and revise the firmware to allow controlled recovery from errors vs uncontrolled RESETs. In other words, when there is a problem such as a filament loading error, there should be more than just an option to retry. There should be options to retry OR abort, which would methodically close the files as it recovers.
MK4S/MMU3
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
If you are using the "power loss recovery" feature, the printer will write the current state of the print job to the USB drive. This happens after every line of gcode, I believe, otherwise it would not be very useful for recovery. Just do a line count on a gcode file and you will see how many write cycles there are for just one file. For instance the gcode for the Prusa Belt Tension Meter is half a megabyte and already has over 20k lines. This is probably also the cause for the drive getting very hot, which was reported by many users. USB thumb drives were no created for the purpose of being written to continuously and they will fail if treated this way. That is why it is not recommended to use them as e.g. a boot drive for an operating system.
RE: Whats on the USB stick - missing due to box damage
If you are using the "power loss recovery" feature, the printer will write the current state of the print job to the USB drive. This happens after every line of gcode, I believe, otherwise it would not be very useful for recovery. Just do a line count on a gcode file and you will see how many write cycles there are for just one file. For instance the gcode for the Prusa Belt Tension Meter is half a megabyte and already has over 20k lines. This is probably also the cause for the drive getting very hot, which was reported by many users. USB thumb drives were no created for the purpose of being written to continuously and they will fail if treated this way. That is why it is not recommended to use them as e.g. a boot drive for an operating system.
Ah, that would be an explanation for USB drives failing prematurely. I was not aware that this is how the "power loss recovery" works. I was assuming a separate buffered memory exists to remember the current state, or a "poor man's uninterrupted power supply", e.g. a gold cap which gives the CPU a few seconds to write the state to USB if (and only if) it detects a power outage.
I assume the recovery feature is enabled by default? I will disable it on my printer then, since power losses are very rare here. It would be interesting to know whether users who have encountered USB stick failure had "power loss recovery" enabled.