may try futzing around with it some more today, but the Rumba is supposed to be here tomorrow... hoping to be back up and running again by this weekend. (going thru withdrawals here not being able to print! LOL)

wardjr is being very generous with assistance via pm, but I also appreciate any additional advice/assistance/etc from others that have made this leap as well.

We went pretty basic with the board due to cost (tight budget at the moment) - only has the 4988 stepper drivers for now... but it should still get things back up and running again.

everything else is staying stock for a while longer (hot end and bed heat) - had it dialed in pretty well when the usb crapped out... oh well - such is the life of a hobbiest, right? LOL

dug thru the box of old computer parts (have built a few, and salvaged stuff from a few others) to come up with some fans for cooling - it is funny - came up with: one 40mm, one 45mm, one 50mm, one 65mm and a big giant 80mm fan! LOL (can actually come up with a 2nd 80mm if I want it - from an old computer psu... LOL) also came up with a power cord for the psu & some wiring for extending anything that might need extending - now to poke around in the garage for some decent guage wiring to go from the psu to the board...

have done lots of searching & reading the last couple of days - can you say "brain overload"? LOL but i think by the time the board gets here I will be ready to dive head first into these uncharted (for me) waters...

thanks grob - i admit i had to take a deep breath before diving into this - lol

I may continue to mess with it over the next few days, but pulled the trigger on ordering a Rumba & an upgraded psu - both should be here by the end of the week. Would have preferred to put it off a little while longer, but this thing doesnt seem to want to cooperate with me.

have spent the last day or so researching how to get firmware installed on the Rumba when it gets here - wish the wiki was working...

anyway - thanks to all for the help with this... on to new adventures with the Rumba! LOL

Hehe well cost aside, this will be a solid solution to an annoying problem, so you may feel the cost was worth it overall. Enjoy!

Firmware for the rumba is easy, using the latest Arduino IDE, download Adrian's version of Marlin, edit Configuration.h as suitable for the rumba and your printer, then:
Board = "Arduino Mega 2560 or Mega ADK"
Serial Port = COMx (whatever comes up when you have it plugged in!)
And you just click upload. Done.

I may continue to mess with it over the next few days, but pulled the trigger on ordering a Rumba & an upgraded psu - both should be here by the end of the week. Would have preferred to put it off a little while longer, but this thing doesnt seem to want to cooperate with me.

have spent the last day or so researching how to get firmware installed on the Rumba when it gets here - wish the wiki was working...

anyway - thanks to all for the help with this... on to new adventures with the Rumba! LOL

It sounds like mucking around with the USB connection did temporarily fix the problem... No reason to suggest it's not still there. See if you can follow the D+/D- traces on the board and make sure there isn't a dry joint or some other issue somewhere else along them... Otherwise, really quite tricky to judge what's going on here!

Good luck!

during a print this morning it started the pausing thing again...

sure enough, one of the solder joints on the front of the board had worked loose (wasnt solid enough to start with?)
anyway, poking at things after the print finished, it broke free completely... broke out the soldering iron and reattached...

tried running the same print again (only a 16 minute print & friend wants two of the item) started out ok, but then started pausing again...
grrr....

I am kind of worried that repeated heat from the soldering iron is gonna fry the small components completely...

Found a pinout with a google image search for 'usb B pinout' and set to work.

took a bit of work to get the socket off the board but off it came...

soldering in the wires went fairly well... the usb power trace is well marked, making it fairly easy to determine where all the other wires went.

and to prevent those tiny wires from being pulled on, i used some heatshrink to stabilize & ziptied the cable to the board...

put the board back in place, hooked it all back up and turned it on. fired up the computer and tried to connect - hmmmm...nothing - "com 10 doesn't exist"... into the device manager, sure enough, no teensyUSB...

a bit of research later, and inspecting the pics I had taken, I noticed that one of the data traces looked like it might have been heat damaged (see first pic)...

Ok, so maybe a jumper wire?

My first attempt worked, but only very briefly - about a minute and a half before it lost connection again... jumper wire was too small a guage i guess? but - it verified that I did have a damaged trace issue...

removed the too small wire and went for a piece of solid core phone line wire - the kind that runs from the box outside into the house... and jumpered both data lines, just to be sure. Not the prettiest job in the world, but - It Works!

And it works quite well! the printer runs so much smoother, and quieter, now - hard to believe that fixing a bad USB connection can make that much of a difference, but it did. ran 2 prints (under an hour each, one with enough infill that if it was going to pause, it would have) to make sure it was going to work, ok - not a single pause during either one.

Quite happy with the results of this modification. (bank account is happy, too - now I can save up a little more ordering a Rumba)

I had trouble with the usb connector on my SD board too, if you put radial load on the cable it bends the insides of it to the point it doesn't work so well!

If you're looking for a cheaper solution, you could probably unsolder the connector and solder a chopped-open usb cable straight into the four terminals...

now that is an interesting option for a short term fix - you wouldnt happen to have a pin-out diagram available would you?

I really do want to upgrade to a Rumba board when the bank account will allow, but for an immediate fix...

(and it isnt so much a "radial" twist - more of a horizontal, pulling the cable end to one side thing, but yeah, it is eventually going to give out completely)

If you're looking for a cheaper solution, you could probably unsolder the connector and solder a chopped-open usb cable straight into the four terminals...

by putting a little bit of a twist on the cable end - used a rubberband to put tension on it toward one side - it no longer pauses during a print.

it looks like i will be needing to order that Rumba sooner rather than later...

Baud rate in RH was set to 250,000
the com port was only set to 9600 bits per second - highest option I have there is 128,000...

on the XP desktop...

RH baud rate = 250,000
Com port bps = 128,000 (again, highest option available)

are bps & baud rate the same thing?

the new USB cable did seem to help some with the pausing, altho it did pause a couple of times - very breifly - during a test print last night.

RH version is 1.0.6 on both laptop and desktop... baud rate, i would have to check

But during that print I noticed the bed temp dropped off and would not come back up, even after bumping it up a couple of degrees. it was initially set to 110, came up to temp fine, started my print and a couple of minutes into the print it dropped to around 108. bumped it up to 112, trying to get it to heat up again, and nothing...held 108 for the duration of the print (around 20 minutes)