MakerGear Forum

I wasn't sure if everyone already knew about the 8.3 naming convention causing print names to show up with a "~" in the "print from sd" menu, but I thought I'd share how I've worked around it.

I have a lot of print files, many with different copies of objects and it gets hard to keep the names straight on the SD card. Harder still when S3D defaults to naming files *.gcode
The 5 letter file extension doesn't play well with the way the M2 reads the SD card, so if you want your file names to show up correctly, just rename them on the card from a .gcode file to a .g file.

You can do this to all files in a directory at one time using DOS commands from the command prompt. Just enter command prompt, navigate to the directory where the files are located and type REN *.GCODE *.G

You still have to keep the name to 8 characters or less, but it helps if you have lot of files.

I could be wrong, but I believe this limitation is because the FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 file system specifications are public, but Microsoft's Long File Name (LFN) method must be licensed. At least that's what it sounded like when I read the info on Chan's FAT-FS source code when I used it on a microcontroller project.

(BTW, FAT-FS is nice and easy and small --- I'm using it on an teeny MP3 player that plays from SD cards, using an MC9S08QE32, 32k of flash and 2k of RAM. That's right, 2 kilobytes of RAM total for the project! Get out your shoehorns, boys!)

Dale