Nothing happens

[Alan56 0]

I have an Ender-3 V3 SE that is connected to my PC via a USB cable.  I can upload files to Cura, but I can't send them to the printer.  I have watched several tutorials, but none show how to send the files to the printer.  I went into the Cura website and read to simply click on the "Print" button in the upper left corner of the screen.  There is no "Print" button anywhere on the screen.  What am I doing wrong?

Edited November 27 by Alan56

[Slashee_the_Cow 482]

Printing over USB is deprecated and no longer supported. It exists in Cura just so you can use older printers which don't read a memory card or USB drive.

 

It's also a bad idea because if your computer crashes, your print fails, if your computer freezes up for a few seconds, you'll probably end up with a blob in your model, if something else is hogging the CPU and commands can't be sent fast enough, it'll cause blobs in your print as it waits for the next command.

 

Printing directly from Cura can be achieved if you set up a dedicated system like OctoPrint (which only requires a cheap Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W) and install the plugin for it, but it's much easier just to use a memory card. Printing directly from the memory card also means that if the print gets interrupted due to a power outage or whatever, the printer can resume the print from where it was.

[Alan56 0]

Thanks for that.  I was using SD cards, but I couldn't get them to work either.  That's why I went to the cable.  I will find some new SD cards tomorrow and give that a try.  I read that the Ender will not accept any cards larger than 8 GB.  Is that true?

 

[Slashee_the_Cow 482]

4 minutes ago, Alan56 said:

Thanks for that.  I was using SD cards, but I couldn't get them to work either.  That's why I went to the cable.  I will find some new SD cards tomorrow and give that a try.  I read that the Ender will not accept any cards larger than 8 GB.  Is that true?

4-16GB will work. Higher than that, no. The card needs to be be formatted as FAT32 with a sector size of 4096 bytes (which usually isn't the default). All the memory cards that have come with the Creality machines I've bought have been trash and failed within a week. Good thing is I've been hoarding gadgets for many years so I managed to find an old 16GB card in a woefully outdated digital camera. Cards that small can be hard to find these days (although look on Amazon) and will probably cost you as much as a bigger card.

[Alan56 0]

I appreciate all the help.  Thanks!