Monday, 21 January 2013

Reprap Resuming a Broken or Paused Print

A pain that most of us 3d printers always come across eventually is a failed print due to lost connection, power cuts, etc. Recently I was controlling pronsole.py over ssh and the LAN failed. The best solution is to run pronsole as a background process (press cnt-Z and then type bg at the prompt) which will keep the process running after a lost connection. This time though I forgot and I was 2.5 hours into a print!

After months of ripping off the busted parts and chucking them I figured it was time to learn to continue or resume a busted print.

  • reconnect to pronsole over ssh (on my raspberry pi!!)
    • OR open pronterface (or other host software)
  • connect to the printer again
  • type M114 : Get Current Position
  • open the Gcode in a txt editor and find the Z height returned by M114
    • delete all code above it
  • search in the remaining code for the X coord followed by the Y coord (beware of rounding errors)
    • Once you find a match delete all code above that line.
  • save the file and load it into pronsole (or pronterface)
  • print
If all goes well the printer should continue as if nothing had happened!

Best of luck, and please comment about your experiences with paused/broken prints and how you resolved them.

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