Display shows garbage characters

[davew 0]

Occasionally my Controller display screen starts showing garbage characters. The actual print is still workign fine and the display works - you can see characters changing in the places you expect. It's just that the characters it shows are rubbish. Switch off/on cures it but it is a bit worrying!

 

Anyone any ideas what might be going on?

 

[foehnsturm 969]

Same with mine and with the SD card reader as well. But no real idea why, a loose contact or a less then optimum solder joint somewhere?

 

[gr5 2,167]

I used to see this often when I used to do USB printing (I don't any more so it might be that) and also I upgraded my firmware last January and haven't seen it since (also did more upgrades this past spring). The version of marlin you get from here is much much newer than that which comes with cura. And it has some very nice and minor feature improvements - try it and if you don't like it you can just reinstall the version that comes with cura:

http://marlinbuilder.robotfuzz.com/

So I'm thinking it is a bug related to USB printing or maybe a bug that was fixed in Marlin.

 

[davew 0]

Thanks GR5,

I have never printed via USB, always via the SD card but I might try the Marlin upgrade anyway.

 

[Daid 305]

The LCD communication is "fire and forget", no error checking is done. This causes a single communication error to give the above problem.

Re-inserting the SD card fixes it (as it re-configures the LCD screen) but that's not a solution during printing.

 

[bret4 0]

My controller just did the same thing. Screen was full of odd letters then it stopped printing right in the middle of the print. I was printing from the SD card but did have it pluged into the usb cable at one time today. Not pluged in when it went bad. Turned the machine off and back on and it is working again. Getting tired of spending more time adjusting the machine and now that it is working good this happens. I guess this is really a kit machine. Not something figured out yet.

 

[bret 0]

I just had this problem again with the LCD screen messing up. This time it didn't stop printing. It did mess up the print by shifting it by a little. I know what caused it now. I used a metal flashlight to help me see my print while printing. The light touched one of the long metal screws on the print head. It must have picked up a little static charge and confused the computer. I'm going to be a lot more careful with touching things when printing. It's really cold and dry today (16'F) outside. Plus I just started printing on glass with glue stick. Could be the glass on top of the lucite table and the belts are building up a charge in the machine just waiting for me to ground it out. Maybe I should add a ground wire to the machine someplace?