USB connection loss... without Printrun connected first

[rimbo 0]

Whenever I'm trying to use Cure over USB without first establishing a connection through Printrun the USB connection is lost in the following way:

- print job continues

- bed and hotend heating is disabled

- Pause and Abort buttons are greyed out

- no controls work in the MONITOR tab

- the extruder motor obviously stalls as it is commanded to feed the filament completely cold

cura.log

 

I've completed *multiple* print jobs yesterday, between 30min and 1h30min each yesterday. Today I wanted to confirm whether it was all my imagination. I'm pretty sure it wasn't.

 

I'm not interested in advices against using USB. I know my setup, I know my use case.

 

My printer is a smoothieware LUME+

https://lumeplus.wixsite.com/lume/produkty

 

Edited February 18 by rimbo

[ahoeben 1,951]

19 minutes ago, rimbo said:

I'm not interested in advices against using USB. I know my setup, I know my use case.

The USB support in Cura is not actively maintained, and hasn't been for man years. If it works it works, if it doesn't work it doesn't work. Period. You can be uninterested in the following advice, but it is all you are going to get.

 

Your best bet if you want to continue printing over USB is to install OctoPrint (either on the same computer as Cura, or on a separate computer such as a Raspberry Pi) and use the OctoPrint connection plugin to connect it with Cura, and disable USB printing from Cura directly.

[Slashee_the_Cow 279]

29 minutes ago, rimbo said:

I'm not interested in advices against using USB. I know my setup, I know my use case.

My mum wasn't interested in advice against using Windows XP on her computer after Microsoft stopped releasing security updates for it. I installed Linux despite her protestations (LMDE, because Cinnamon has a similar layout to Windows by default and the hand-me-down hardware is a bit old). And she got used to it reasonably quickly since she spends half her time in Chrome anyway.

 

Technology gets outmoded. USB printing in slicing programs is a relic of the days when printers had no brains of their own  (not even enough to run a print off an SD card, and there's actually Marlin commands for doing exactly that thing) and had to be fed instructions line by line. Now, there's no good reason to do it unless you're doing it from a dedicated system (I have OctoPrint running on a Raspberry Pi) and plenty of reasons to not do it (cause prints getting interrupted when your computer freezes sucks).

[rimbo 0]

1 hour ago, ahoeben said:

The USB support in Cura is not actively maintained, and hasn't been for man years. If it works it works, if it doesn't work it doesn't work. Period. You can be uninterested in the following advice, but it is all you are going to get.

 

Your best bet if you want to continue printing over USB is to install OctoPrint (either on the same computer as Cura, or on a separate computer such as a Raspberry Pi) and use the OctoPrint connection plugin to connect it with Cura, and disable USB printing from Cura directly.

See? That's a useful piece of information. I thought someone would be interested in reviewing the log so I could assist further ending in, hopefully, an issue entry. Since it's "if it works, it works", I'm going to continue priming Cura with Printrun. I do many small prints. USB connection getting alive for me with Cura was a godsend. It saved me hours upon hours and is probably the only reason that printer hasn't ended up in a scrapheap yet 😄

 

Also, the issue is new. I've been using USB for the past 2-3 months. The issue started surfacing just this month.

[Slashee_the_Cow 279]

50 minutes ago, rimbo said:

Also, the issue is new. I've been using USB for the past 2-3 months. The issue started surfacing just this month.

Install a firmware update for your printer lately? That's the most common reason these things can mysteriously break. It's also possible a software update (even if minor) or driver update on your computer could have had something to do with it.

 

54 minutes ago, rimbo said:

I do many small prints. USB connection getting alive for me with Cura was a godsend. It saved me hours upon hours and is probably the only reason that printer hasn't ended up in a scrapheap yet 😄

Download OctoPi (prebuilt Raspberry Pi image which makes it a dedicated headless OctoPrint server), get that set up (easy), download @ahoeben's awesome OctoPrint Connection plugin and you'll think it was sent by whatever is even better than a god.

[ahoeben 1,951]

Note that if you would prefer to keep everything on a single computer, you can also install OctoPrint on Windows, MacOS or Linux.  Scroll down on https://octoprint.org/download/ for instructions.

 

[Dustin 132]

Im just going to mention this now to set the tone moving forward.

UltiMaker's stance on USB printing from within UltiMaker Cura, is to not do USB printing from within UltiMaker Cura.
I know you don't like that answer, but it is what it is.

As mentioned earlier, its not actively maintained or updated. Its mostly just there at this point to assist with firmware refreshing of older/legacy UltiMaker 3D printers (UltiMaker Original, UltiMaker 2/2+). 

[Slashee_the_Cow 279]

9 hours ago, Dustin said:

UltiMaker's stance on USB printing from within UltiMaker Cura, is to not do USB printing from within UltiMaker Cura.
I know you don't like that answer, but it is what it is.

I'm going to bookmark your post so I can link to it any time someone has a problem with USB printing.

[rimbo 0]

The fact that I don't need most of the prominent octoprint features and I do need Printrun (Pronterface) has given me an idea: I should test printing via USB with Printrun. I think I haven't mentioned it - my printer has no functioning Ethernet module. I even tried the jumper soldering method described on Smoothieware github.