browner87 wrote:Bump? It's been like a month now and I have to yet to make a successful print thanks to everything peeling after a few minutes of printing from the lack of heat... I've tried hairsparay and I'll be trying a glass bed soon too, but I really want this bed to heat. This is really poor support for a product I've easily spent over $1000 on. It's not like this is an issue of lazy calibration or lack of trying, it's a simple firmware bug!
Well, no I don't think it's a firmware bug. If it was, it wouldn't be so a rare problem. Everybody gets the same firmware. Unless of course you modified your firmware, or the machine itself. I'm assuming you did not. When did you get the Solidoodle? Which motherboard does it have? Did you buy it used?
All of this matters.
The Solidoodle has a safety feature that shuts down the machine should there ever be inconsistent temperature readings. This might be what you're experiencing when you talk about having to do a hard restart on the machine.
I don't have much to work with here data wise. I'm curious as to how well you can replicate the problem in question. Are you sure that it is only the situation where both the bed and heater and activated that there is a crash? I think you, and the other fellow in this thread are the only folks who have characterized the problem in this way. My instinct is that there might be more to your situation than what you are characterizing, and that it might be one of our more common problems in another form.
My best guess is that there is something electrically wrong with the machine. If I understand what you are saying correctly, then repetier host crashes, and the board on the Solidoodle needs a restart. If this is the case, my best guess is that something is allowing excessive communication between RH and the SD. I know of no such problem having ever occurred, but let me know list a few of our common failures, and maybe this will give you an idea of what is happening:
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-Faulty USB
It could be that there is excessive loss of commands between the machine and your computer due to a faulty USB cable. We have seen this before, but it usually manifests as problems connecting. Try another USB cable and another computer.
-Improper voltage from USB
If you are using an un-powered USB hub, you might not be getting the full 5V to the motherboard needed for regular operations. This usually results in the board not working at all.
-Improper voltage from the wall
The machine reacts *very* badly to voltage spikes. This usually results in the machine shutting down. In poorly wired homes this can happen when the Solidoodle is plugged directly into the wall, and another appliance is started close to the Solidoodle. A common story goes "I flipped the light switch in the bathroom and the Solidoodle shut off." This problem occurs a great deal in Australia, as line voltage in Australia tends to fluctuate a bit more than in the U.S and Europe.
-Dead Mosfet
The machine has a low voltage and a high voltage side. One is powered via your USB cable, and the other via the wall. The MOSFETs are little gates that allow wall voltage in to power the hot-end and heating mat. We have had a small number of incidents where mosfets have died prematurely. This has one of two outcomes: Constant heating, or no heating whatsoever. I suppose that if you had an issue with the MOSFET on the board, then it might cause weird issues with heating.
In the error, is the error the same regardless of order of operations? If you heat the bed first, then the nozzle does that change things? vice versa?
-Improper Thermistor Wiring
This is by far the most common electric problem on the Solidoodle. The Thermistor for the hot-end is wired up with several molex clips, and solder points which tend to fail in shipping. What will happen is that the machine will work just fine, and as the machine moves around a small open circuit or short may happen - permanently or for a split second. In either case, the result is almost always the machine shutting off. As I said before, the machine has safety feature that locks the machine in case of a weird temperature reading. If massively high, or massively low temperatures are recorded the machine just shuts off. The multimeter article on the solidoodle wiki (wiki.solidoodle.com) has some information on troubleshooting this. Ensure that there is continuity between the thermistor and the motherboard.
Here's a line from your code:
ok T:22.5 /0.0 B:22.5 /0.0 @:0 B@:0
This should be fine, as the bed shouldn't initiate a crash for 0C.
-dead bed
The beds we use are very cheap (saving passed to you!.) We test them all, but sometimes they experience "premature death." Usually this means no heat, period. How well does your bed heat?
Theory: If your bed heats *very* slowly, perhaps the machine is putting the bed on 100% duty cycle to try and reach your desired temperature. This might happen with a slowly dying bed. I could imagine the control algorithm for the bed spewing commands to raise the temperature, and this causing some problems.
-Improperly applied connections between thermistor/heating elements and motherboard
Both sets of heating elements and thermistors and connecting to the motherboard via a set of wires and molex clips. If these are not crimped and installed correctly, the connection to the motherboard may be intermittent.
-Misc. electrical issues with the motherboard itself
We do occasionally get factory defective motherboards. They typically only function in "door stop" mode, and therefore do not make it past QA.
-Motherboard overheating
The motherboard is vulnerable to overheating. Keep your house extremely hot? Have your machine in a shed in the southern hemisphere? Perhaps you might want to put a cooling fan on the machine. This can manifest as the machine turning off at weird times. The chips for the stepper motors are most vulnerable to this, and this is where most folks place their cooling fans. Most of these cases seem to come up in Texas and Australia during the summer months. I've never supported anyone with "over cooling" issues, but I suppose there is a lower limit too.
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Here's my advice for what you should do:
1) Go to the Solidoodle Wiki and read up on multimeter testing. Read everything, and test everything.
2) Report anything fishy here.
3) Ponder the failures I described above. Let us know if anything here even *remotely* matches your description
4) Try and reproduce the error. Give us a *step by step* list of the things you did to get the error. Pictures and screenshots from RH are appreciated. Numerical data is appreciated. Videos are appreciated. Temperature graphs are appreciated. Firmware readouts are appreciated. Version numbers for RH, your Operating System, and any other thing you are using on the SD will help a great deal.
Now, I don't know you too well so I don't know what your background is. Chances are that are an engineer. A large percentage of our customer base are Engineers. If you are a mechanical engineer or a software developer, call a buddy who is an electrical engineer. Most EE guys are used to dealing with finicky electrical systems like the ones we talking about here. There may even be a friendly electrical expert on this very forum who can meet with you, and give you a hand. 20 minutes of aimless fiddling may solve a months worth of painstaking tech support couldn't resolve. Our motherboard is *extremely* finicky. I'll be perfectly honest with you, most of the time we get a weird electrical error like this, our repair guys can get the machine working in seconds - it's usually a loose wire or something else that might be "un-fixed" in shipping.
Also, there is most likely a hackerspace close to where you live, where a friendly 3D printer aficionado likely resides. He may be able to apply the requisite fiddling to get the machine up and running.
I'm not trying to pass the buck here, but talking to a local friend might be faster than what we can do from Brooklyn.
As for the firmware, I wont totally dismiss the chance that the firmware is to blame. You could have changed the firmware, or received a weird version of it (not accusing, I just don't know!), or had some other weirder incident happen. We have resources on both our main website (www.solidoodle.com) and wiki.solidoodle.com that help you out with the firmware. If you received your Solidoodle in the last 2-3 months, you received our latest firmware build, which should work perfectly fine. It is exactly what everyone else has. By your readout, I assume this to be the case.
If you are determined to re-flash your firmware, I should caution you: It is tricky. Non software developers tend to stumble with it. Read the directions *very* carefully. This is *not* like updating the firmware on your phone. For all Solidoodles, the most sure-fire way is to use an AVR programming cable. You should be able to flash without it using USB, but the cable makes things fool-proof. If you decide to go this route, please be patient and read the directions very carefully. It is normal for the process to fail on the first try.
If you have an older machine, or a used machine and you put the latest SD3 firmware on it, that might be your problem but I somewhat doubt it. There is community firmware that better supports the old machines than our official branch does, but none of the changes between the two effects the heating bed/nozzle in the way you describe.
Also, you might want to try using RH on a different machine. Are you on mac? The mac version is a little wonky. SD does not make RH, and RH has never been super up to date on the mac. The best operating system to use in Windows 7.
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As for us the company:
1) Have you contacted SD support? If you have a truly broken machine we're almost always ready to replace the parts or the whole machine. We can't guarantee we can do it fast, but we will do it if the machine is broken due to us. This may be the case. Did they get you what you needed? Were you properly taken care of? I'll make the right calls if you think you were dealt the wrong cards by tech support.
Again: How long have you had the machine? Did you buy it used?
We are far less able to help if you bought the machine second hand.
2) As for the quality of our parts, I understand your frustration. As you can see from what I wrote above, supporting these machines can be challenging. Right now, we are trying to shove a lot into a product that *could* cost two or three times what it costs. If it is any solace, most 3D printers have issues of this ilk. Heating systems in 3D printers are temperamental and cheap parts in them do not help that quality.
We try to make up for that by replacing any factory defective part. We can't avoid some of the complexities of maintenance and usage (and neither can many of our competitors, by the way.) However, we are determined to help you through the process the best we can.
One thing that makes many of our users happy is that the Solidoodle is a *very* sturdy frame for modifications. You can often replace some of the more temperamental parts with more reliable (and expensive) counterparts for far less than it would have cost to buy an equivalent machine.
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I hope something I said in here helps. I understand you are frustrated.
What can we do to help?
Former Solidoodle employee, no longer associated with the company.
