I work for a mid-sized museum and we were donated a brand new SainSmart Infi-20 3D printer. I understand that belt printers are not ideal for beginners, but alas, I am a beginner and this is what I was given. I also know very little about computers, so I do apologize if this is a simple thing. I appreciate any and all assistance.
I am having a very difficult time getting Cura to save a sliced file to the SD card in its entirety.
For example: I downloaded a prehistoric shark model from Thingiverse. The STL file is around 39mb. When I open it in Cura, Cura starts acting really weird; moving very slow, not responding when I click "prepare", and saying "unable to slice". When it does eventually save to my 4gb SD card, it will only save a fraction of the data. The print is supposed to take 3 hours, but the printer finishes in 20 minutes, having only printed the supports. I have gotten it to print the face of the shark, but that's about it.
I downloaded a different file from Thingiverse, and printed it. It was a teeny, tiny, cartoon shark. It printed the tiny version, but when I upscaled it and tried to print again, it went through the same problems of only printing the supports and claiming to be finished.
The SD card has some pre-installed gcodes on it that the system doesn't seem to have much problem printing.
What do I need to do?
My SD card is formatted to FAT32.
My computer is a Dell running Windows 10 on a x64 system.
The layer tests come out fine and the extruder does the initial blob before hand that always works out.