Printing with the vertex worked pretty well. Till now…
In the past i printed even 20h parts without any problem.
I found a pretty nice preset which i am using since a half year.
However, my last few prints failed after about 4 hours printing. The vertex
shuts suddenly down while printing like you have pushed the reset button.
After the running text disapears, the printer writes as every time ‘Vertex is ready’.
Now you can start a print job again without any problem. Till the 4 houry are over.
Then the printer shuts down again…
What can i do, that the vertex prints longer than this periode of time.
I would be very thankful, if anybody has an idea what is going wrong.
Thank you for your fast reply.
I think the STL files cannot be the problem. This issue happened in the last few attempts with different objects/STL files.
[quote=“Wrong Way”]Check the reset button just above the SD card slot.
Make sure it’s not touching the plexiglass.[/quote]
Thank you for your idea.
The reset button above the SD card slot is not touching the plexiglass.
By pushing it, you can feel a nice working button with the usual resistance…
I had that problem during months : after having changed the motherboard, the temperature sensor and the heater, the problem was the wires loom for the printhead having copper broken inside, so must of the time it worked well, but in certain circunstancies the contact is lost and the printer stops printing in the middle of a print…
After having changed the wires loom the problem has been definitely solved !
[quote=“Hyrokumata”]Could be temperature related.
Check if PSU isn’t overheating or even some driver, or mainboard.
Cumps
Jorge Oliveira[/quote]
Thank you very much for that reply!
How can i check the temperature of the parts objectively? By touching the stepper drivers,
i know that they got very hot also in the past when everything worked well. However maybe they got hotter in the last prints and caused that issue.
Could it be possible that adding some additional fans for cooling PSU and motherboard are solveing my problem?
[quote=“Zorro_X”]I had that problem during months : after having changed the motherboard, the temperature sensor and the heater, the problem was the wires loom for the printhead having copper broken inside, so must of the time it worked well, but in certain circunstancies the contact is lost and the printer stops printing in the middle of a print…
After having changed the wires loom the problem has been definitely solved ![/quote]
Thank you for telling your experience!
I think the cable loom is not the reason for my problem. By unplugging the connection to the printhead while printing, the vertex does not the same as my issue is.
The printer says ‘mintemp’ because it cannot reach the termistors anymore. However it does not shut down like pushing the reset butten…
the broken loom did not make it say “mintemp” error, it is like the glitch of loosing contact for a moment make the printer stop printing but still heating at the right temperature : just stopped.
At the end I began to have the “mintemp” error, only at that moment I began to suspect the loom (after a few parts replaced before, under the advice of my reseller local).
I do know these machine are sensitive to static electricity and power surges.
Did you switch anything on when it happened like florescent lights or a motor heater or A/C?
[quote=“lv234”][quote=“Hyrokumata”]Could be temperature related.
Check if PSU isn’t overheating or even some driver, or mainboard.
Cumps
Jorge Oliveira[/quote]
Thank you very much for that reply!
How can i check the temperature of the parts objectively? By touching the stepper drivers,
i know that they got very hot also in the past when everything worked well. However maybe they got hotter in the last prints and caused that issue.
Could it be possible that adding some additional fans for cooling PSU and motherboard are solveing my problem?[/quote]
I’m sorry for delay.
PSU has a max temperature threshold. If it goes over it should shut itself down to prevent damage. It it’s the PSU overheating it can come from alot of “places”:
Too much demand from it, if u added new stuff
PSU malfunctionning
Bad wiring ( short circuited wirings, damaged wires, etc. )
I think it’s not a malfunctionning PSU cause you say it stops after 4 hours of work. Seems, it could be PSU overheating…I don’t know.
[quote=“Wrong Way”]I do know these machine are sensitive to static electricity and power surges.
Did you switch anything on when it happened like florescent lights or a motor heater or A/C?[/quote]
That kills my prints every time.
Move to LED lights and tape locked the main light switch
After 2 months intensive testing i was not able to solve the problem. Interesting was that the printer didn’t stop every time at the mentioned 4 hours.
Sometimes after a half hour and the next time after 6 hours.
Overheating definitely cant be the problem. I added a few fans for cooling the PSU and the motherboard.
By touching the heat emmiting parts you feel no heat any more. However that isn’t the issue.
Also replacing the PSU wasn’t a step forward. The whole wirering of the vertex looks tidy and seems good.
I am a bit afraid that the mainboard has a damage but why is everything running well in the first periode of time?
Replacing the frimware back to the old one and back to the latest brought no success.
In the last few prints i recognised strange signs on the Display.
Please check out this picture: we.tl/fjk0GKiZk4
Do you think this is relatet with the problem?
Could it be that the slicer workes not right and causes in one layer an error which stops the printer?
Or do you have additional ideas which could help me by solving this annoying issue?
The corrupted display adds up to the electrical interference assumption. Try to plug the printer in a non grounded outlet. Or use a UPS.
Search for noise generating devices in the neighborhood (they can be of any kind : fridge, motor, neon, vacuum cleaner …)
Huh, good advice about the noisy power outlet. I also had the corrupted characters from time to time (with no failed prints though) and after moving the printer to a different outlet they don’t appear anymore.
Another thing: Did you check the g-code (not stl) whether it’s complete?
I’m asking, because I ran into that problem a few weeks ago. Same result as yours with prints just stopping after a few hours for no apparent reason (USB tethered and SD-card). As I was standing there screwdriver in hand it occured to me to check what’s actually on the SD-card when it happened again and half the g-code was missing. It simply stopped in the middle of a line.
After some investigation I found out that it sometimes takes Repetier host 2+ minutes to actually save the g-code with no indication of that progress. So I must have ripped the SD-card out while it was still saving. Since discovering this I open each g-code file with Notepad++ after saving to see if my end-g-code is there. If it is, it will print fine. Additionally, Notepad++ will not open the file while it’s being saved, it will just wait. Also make sure to “saveley remove hardware”. I know nobody does that, but it will make sure that no writing operation is going on while removing the card.
I assume that this also happens over USB, because RH will write a local temp file for the g-code and may actually start printing before it’s finished writing the file and in that case just stop doing so. Another reason why printing over USB is a bad idea.
Five minutes after my post above my printer stopped printing in the middle of a print and this time it definitely wasn’t the g-code. Let’s talk about irony.
After a few days of fiddling and being close to throwing the printer out of the window, it turned out to be a variaton of this:
quote=“Zorro_X” the problem was the wires loom for the printhead having copper broken inside, so must of the time it worked well, but in certain circunstancies the contact is lost and the printer stops printing in the middle of a print…
(…)[/quote]
In my case it wasn’t the wire loom, it was the ferrule for the thermistor (using an E3D-hotend in this machine). The tiny wire had come loose probably because someone (probably me) didn’t pay attention to the instructions on the E3D website (stopped after the second picture) and forgot to make little hooks into the wires to secure them further (I was supposed to do that?). This lead to intermittend connection loss between the mainboard and the thermistor with a rather random selection of outcomes. Sometimes it would display that is was still printing, but not do anything and be even frozen and not react to anything. The hotend came up to well over 300°C on one of those occasions (the original one would have been toast), other times it would just display that it is ready without resetting. So it was really surprising what a fault like this can cause. It never showed a mintemp error btw.
In my case that’s unfortunately not the whole picture as I would additionally get random resets. The cause for this is that the PSU-section of the mainboard actually puts out only ~4.2V, which is lower than the specifications for VCC for the ATMEGA2560-16AU, which is stated as 4.5-5.5V in the datasheet (only the 8MHz version runs on a wider range). Most chips are probably still fine with this as my older Vertex never showed any problems like this, but my newer one does.
This is NOT related to brown outs by the 15V-PSU, because the LM7805 won’t drop out until below 7V. (porblemativ noise on the line still makes it through, so a USV is always a good idea)
The cause for this is that a diode was added after the LM7805 in the circuit which of course drops another 0.7V. My solution for this was to disconnect the original regulator and splice in a small board with an LM7805 raised to 5.7V. No more resets, me happy
Btw.: It does not make any difference whether the printer is plugged into a grounded outlet or a non-grounded one. There is no reference between the DC-ground and the earth-ground of the PSU, it’s floating. The only thing that grounds the mainboard to earth-reference might be a computer connected to the printer via USB.
I am having more or less the same problem… Random freezes, sometimes the heaters turn off, sometimes they go to max (which is really bad!!!). After review of the different posts in here I think I will try to raise the voltage output of the 7805; the voltage to the AVR is definitely too low, it seems.
My Vertex is running fine otherwise and the first year or so I had no problems. So it is really weird… I could of course buy a new mainboard, but the price is ridiculous; for the price of the mainboard and 4 drivers I could get a new China-printer… And since I already have a ramps board I am not using, it would probably be better just to use that… But again: If it is just the voltage it should be easy to fix…
So I just measured the 5V voltage. It is 4.18 V. The minimum datasheet value for the atmega is 4.5 V. So this is definitely a bug in the Velleman design. I have no idea if it will help to raise the voltage, but it is easy to try: The ICSP connector is connected directly to the 5V and both the USB 5V and the main power 5V is connected to this through diodes so I can simply add external 5V directly to the ICSP connector and if it works I can add a diode to the voltage reference pin on the 7805 for a more permanent solution.
I measured 4.23 V as power supply on the “5V” line. This was critical under some load conditions. The LM7805 was providing 5V correctly.
The “5V” - power line is sourced by the internal power supply on the printer board (7805) or alternatively by the USB power supply. To decouple these two sources two diodes are build in, generating the measured voltage drops.
In this configuration it is possible to do an external power supply vor the 5V line separately without problems. My first workaround was a parallel power supply by the USB port, which increased the 5V line to 4.35V. The diodes seems to have a large parametric spread.
My personal solution will be the replacement of the two silicon diodes D4 and D5 by shottky diodes, expecting a voltage drop of max. 0.5V. (The parts are actually in delivery). So with 4.5V supply voltage the Controller will run in “save” conditions.
P.S.: I selected schottky diodes from Vishay (20BQ030), which have a little bit larger housing than the original parts. With these diodes in place I got a supply voltage of 4.7V on the “5V”-Line: only 0.3V voltage drop across the diode.
And since I already have a ramps board I am not using, it would probably be better just to use that… But again: If it is just the voltage it should be easy to fix…