Ultimaker 2 stops and beeps during print

[zxen 4]

This has never happened before. The printer is stopping and beeping during a print. It has been printing all day and the buildplate has become quite hot, so I guess I could turn the buildplate temperature down or off, but this is a brand new replacement buildplate. Let this not sway you into assuming its buildplate related. Can anyone tell me why this might have happened? Could it be an SD card error? No error messages appear. It beeps and stops printing, then resumes on its own a second later every thirty seconds or so. For now I've turned it off in case I'm causing damage. Please help. Thanks.

Edited September 13, 2016 by Guest

[zxen 4]

I noticed that the filament had retracted back up the tube somehow. Maybe the reel was getting stuck or something. This may have resulted in a nozzle overheat?

[gr5 2,210]

Nozzle won't overheat just because it's not printing. It has a thermostat feedback system like a house thermostat but smarter.

Could it be the points are too close together? Some people thing higher resolution is better but you can have too much. It's good to have 16 consequtive gcodes points be at least 8mm apart. Otherwise it can slow down. If you have 16 segments in 1mm it will come to a near complete stop. If you have 16 points in .1mm of space it will indeed stop.

Generally when you export from cad there are options about how many triangles to create when converting curves. You want to keep that as low as possible but still look like a curve and not show obvious facets.

If there are more than about 100K triangles you can reduce them with meshlab:

http://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/polygon_reduction_with_meshlab

What country are you in zxen? This information isn't critical this time but might be next time so please update your profile to include your country where you do your 3d printing.