Oh For Heaven's Sake!

[Jules]

About 2 hours into a 7 hour print the printer suddenly stopped and I got the message:

SENT: M105
WARNING: Firmware unresponsive. Attempting to force continue...

Which seems to be some sort of reference to an attempt to check the nozzle temperature?

Since I'd like to try to save the print if I can....I paused it immediately, dropped the bed, shaved off the glob of goo that it had dumped in that one spot when it stopped for a minute.
Checked the nozzle temperature and toasted my finger.

So, I thought maybe the connection was bad - it was printing over USB. Tightened up all of the connections, sent a couple of bed movement commands. They were eventually performed, but the movements were sluggish and it took a couple of minutes each time for them to be executed.

Tried an extrusion - Again, it did eventually extrude, but it took a long time to get around to it. The communications were filled with the "M105/Firmware unresponsive" comment.

Tried turning off the nozzle heater, let it cool (thinking maybe something had overheated and the thermistor just needed to reset). Heated it back up and tried to resume the print.

No good. Still getting the M105 error message.

Okay, thought it might be a bad thermistor. Cooled it off again and actually swapped out the hotend while the print was paused.

Sent a Fan-Off command that took 10 minutes to execute.

Sent a Fan-On command that took half an hour.

So I'm guessing now that the problem is not the thermistor in the original nozzle. I'm suspecting that I should have printed this damned thing from the SD card instead of trying to send such a large file over USB.

Is there any way to save this print?

It's currently paused while printing over USB. The machine is still running, the bed is heated to 40° to keep it from shrinking too much while I await the answer.

Can I stop the print and restart it from the place where it paused? Is that doable?

[PcS]

I do not know of a way to recover it.You really should print from SD to avoid issues. Someone smarter than me may offer some better ideas. But I have never had that happen . If it won't resume from a pause I'd say you wI'll have to start over .

[Jules]

Crud! I was afraid of that.

Okay, thanks for the info and the help. I think I would have had to start over anyway, since the Communications panel no longer shows the stopping point coordinates, and I didn't write them down while they were showing.
Grrrrrr.

[insta]

If you use Simplify3D it has a "start at layer..." setting in the Advanced tab.

Measure the height of your part exactly and re-slice with "start at layer" enabled. You may have to fudge with the start gcode for this one print to home in the correct sequence so you don't jam your print into the underside of your machine.

Firmware unresponsive is ominous though.


starting to hate Marlin here

[Jules]

Chuckle! Definitely agree with your final comment!

I've had to freeze that part off the plate, so there is no way I'll ever get it to resume correctly now, but I'm going to keep that in mind for the next time.

Uhhhh....By ominous, do you mean there might be a problem with something in the machine or the software?
Please tell me that was just a joke.

(Because I'm kind of jumpy these days. Trying to clean house for extended parental visit while they look for a house nearby - totally un-machine related. Wheeee! Yup! Loads of fun ahead, yay boy.)

[ednisley]

starting to hate Marlin here

There are, of course, two sides to every interface and both must work reliably.

During 4+ years of 3D printing from assorted Linux-based PCs & laptops to printers running Makerbot / SJFW / Marlin firmware, I've never had a problem that boiled down to a USB communication failure. No peculiar setups, no timeouts, no screensaver lockups, no nothing: Linux Just Works.

The SD cards that came with the printers have long since vanished into other projects.

Now, granted, I can force a brief printing stall by, say, lighting up Firefox / Chromium and playing a Youtube video while printing, but that's on a laptop dating back to early 2007 with the Slowest Hard Drive Ever.

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I ain't lyin'... [grin]

[Tim]

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I ain't lyin'... [grin]

I can vouch for the fact that Linux communicates with the printer without communications issues. The only issue I ever had was when I stepped on the USB extension cable under my desk and separated it from the main USB cable---and for that, I printed a connector clamp and posted it on Thingiverse. Newer laptops like to go into sleep mode or hibernation, whether Linux or otherwise, which can be a show-stopper, although usually it's not a problem until you wake the machine up (accidentally or not).

[jsc]

I have several USB drives hooked up to my desktop, which like to decide to spin up at almost random times. As they start up, they would bring a print to a halt until they finished. Since I've moved to OctoPrint on a BBB (under Linux) those communication errors have gone away.

[lem]

So, if the USB communication is an unlikely candidate, what happened to Jules's print?

Any of the firmware experts able to confirm that:
SENT: M105
WARNING: Firmware unresponsive. Attempting to force continue...
is not a catch all error message and really means a communication error?

Maybe the firmware went off in the weeds for awhile and the watchdog timer (if there is one) reported a communications error.

Maybe the firmware was waiting for a condition that never happened (something like extruder temp dropped and took a long time to recover).

The computer took a break and didn't send any more g-code, maybe woke up and sent a little more.

The sun and the moon and Pluto and Venus all lined up from a point of view in a galaxy far, far away.

Larry

[Jules]

The sun and the moon and Pluto and Venus all lined up from a point of view in a galaxy far, far away.

Larry

Chuckle! I wouldn't sweat it......I'm going to have to go with operator error on this one, or one of the frequent line hiccups that we have during any kind of weather around here. (It was raining, and I was cleaning around the computer. I might have jostled something, or we might have had a little surge. Who knows?)

Next time though, for SURE, I'll wait to finish the print before whipping out the duster!