Error on engraving

[ggallant571]

Are any of the components on the board hot. Particularity the large MOSFET. I have a POS nano that heats up badly. There is a degradation of the 5V which leads to the power transistor not completely turning on which leads to more heat and less laser. Took about 10 minutes. Measured 4.2V on the Nano +5V pin.

You might also check the modular power supply.

[Zax]

@Parnold

A lot of thanks to fvuichard for his continued testing. I suggested disabling DTR in T2Laser advanced menu and that seems to have helped although I am not sure why it would make a difference.

He completed a 1.6 million lines file in 4 h and 30 m without errors and last I heard he was testing a >5 million lines file and was >9 hours in with no error.

[Parnold]

I tried the DTR and it didn't have any effect.  If I turn off the failsafe, the burn still stops, but the program kind of freezes in limbo.  I can turn the laser on or off, but can't restart the job.  I am trying a different cable now, but don't have a lot of faith that it will fix the problem.  I'm pretty sure there's no issue with my system, my CPU utilization is at 22% with T2laser running, and I'm only using 4 gig of the 16 I have.  T2laser shows that it is using 249 mb in task manager.
When it crashes and I start closing down the program, I do get an "out of memory" error.  I will screen capture it next time it happens.  Tonight, my first burn attempt crapped out at about 2%.  This is the message I had on my screen tonight.

I'm running in greyscale mode, speed 700 to 5000.  Laser power at 120. 

Does the machine throw out a code that could be posted by the software?  I would buy a lower power laser unit if I was sure it was going to stop the problem, but I would really hate to drop another 80 bucks and still not be able to print anything fairly complex.
Any comments, suggestions, questions?

[nottingham82]

What resolution are you printing at and can you share the image you are trying to print. I have gotten this error before. It happens when I open a huge image or high dpi image or when I am trying to print at a resolution lower than .1. The best solution when you get this error is a PC restart.

[Parnold]

Resolution .1

I'm actually up to 65% complete and it hasn't crapped out yet. 
Also, when it dies, I have touched all of the components on the board on top of the laser unit, as well as the cooling fins etc, and everything feels cool, or only just slightly warm.

This is just a random image, I have had the issue with several images, and I have successfully printed each of those images at least once.  It seems the damn machine knows when I put an expensive piece of wood under the laser.

[Parnold]

Just died at 91%.  If I hit pause the program reports that it paused.  If I click stop, or emergency stop, nothing.  If I click the directional arrows, the unit does respond and move the carriage accordingly.  I can turn the laser on, can pulse, can turn the laser off.  I can adjust the pulse time and laser power.

[nottingham82]

258mb seems high as does 1062 minutes time estimation. How big are you trying to engrave this picture?

[fvuichard]

Finally, I still have this error despite disabling the DTR.

It is really random but the small images (<100 x 100mm) does not seem to be affected.

Like @Parnold, the components are not too hot and the error occurs with different images and not always at the same time.

[ka4wwv]

Similar but not exactly the same problem, set every thing in win10 like power sleep off.  "I think" it was screensaver on my system as I found the burn had stopped and bubbles were showing.  Looked at screensaver settings and couldn't find an off option so I set it to several​ thousand seconds.  Mutipule burns later and no problems.

Hope this helps

Ed

[Zax]

I can only tell you that on my development and test systems (Win7 and 10, both 32 and 64-bit), which includes a very cheap tablet. I've processed G-code files in the millions of lines many, many times. The largest is 7.5 million lines and I've now ran that probably 20 or 30 times over the months and the sender is rock solid on several different Nano's and firmware.

We know the G-code itself isn't the problem, so that only leaves the hardware or some configuration.

T2Laser requests a "high priority" thread from Windows and attempts to prevent power saving, you can also enable "Keep Display On" in the settings menu. There are still other processes; like anti-virus, security, backup that can interfere with operation and other things on the USB bus that could potentially cause issues.

Make sure you are both using the latest version, install v1.4d or later so it's the online deployment version. The DTR setting is now static so it is remembered if you forget to disable it every time you startup.

Do not disable "Fail Safe" mode or you won't know that Grbl reported an error, and then things will just act strange like you describe and you'll wonder why. If Grbl sends an error it usually means the communications got messed up and it's out of sync, that could happen if the USB port goes to power saving mode or the Nano memory is corrupt or the cable is bad. So many reasons especially on a long burn, and certainly difficult to troubleshoot.

[Parnold]

Thanks for all the ideas and input.  I'm determined to get this figured out.
Nottingham82. the image I am trying to burn was 250mm x 215mm.
Karwwv, I had my system set to never sleep, but the screen would black out at 20 minutes.  I've changed that now.
I also found a couple other settings that might have affected things.

I bumped the hard drive sleep time up to 600 minutes, it was at 20 I think.  I also disabled the USB Selective Suspend Setting?  I'll report on my success hopefully.

[Zax]

I checked my main development PC and it has similar settings to what you had (before changing them) so I don't think that's the fix, but still worth testing.

What's odd is sometimes you get almost all the way through a job, other times it errors early.

If you are using the latest version of T2Laser there's a menu option to install the most recent CH340 driver, maybe try that if you still have problems.

[carolynsdad]

Have you possibly got a program or process running in the background that periodically makes unseen demands on processor time or memory at high priority such as attempting to access the internet for an update or some other servicing?

Have a look in Windows Task Manager on the Perfomance tab and then click the Resource Monitor button and see if there is any unexpected activity or memory usage.

Other ideas are:
Clearing caches
Defrag your hard drive
Check in Control Panel | Action Centre | Check for Solutions to unreported problems   see if there are any programs with memory leakage issues.

Hope you fnd something in there soon,
Mike

[Stonemull]

Other devices plugged into the same USB controller can cause a loss of comms and a reconnection.

I was playing with Zadiq which is a USB bootloader for STM2 hardware and if I gpgave thst running then after a sleep, I can wake my PC with the mouse, then the mouse stops working till I cycle dongle power.

Not helping this issue, just saying that USB can be a finicky beast and it is not always the device you are suspecting that can be the sole cause if the problems.
It might be worth checking the windows error logs too, see if there is anything relevant.

[fvuichard]

my stepper motor cable  has just broken. I was wondering if it was not possible that was causing me errors only on big picture because that was pulling on it and create bad contact.
I just order new cables and I keep you informed if there is change.