I’ve recently been troubleshooting my mini2. One of the things I did was upgrade to the latest firmware. Oddly, it seems to print really slowly - that is it moves in small jerks, pasing maybe a tenth of a second in between, when before it would run continuously. Sometimes during the print it’ll print normally, but most of it seems to consist of this print / pause action. It’s not clear to me why it gets so slow in some parts, because it will often speed up while printing essentially the same g-code on successive layers. I had at first thought it might be due to the nature of the layer’s g-code, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
What’s especially odd is it will do this as well when it’s printing the initial skirt (at least for part of it, if not all of it).
I’m using CuraLE with my Mini2, I have my Z-offset set to -1.15 with an initial layer flow of 90%, a layer height of 0.15 and 100% infill. Otherwise using the standard / normal PLA profile.
I suppose the main question is, are there any conditions which might cause the mini2 to execute g-code in small steps with pauses in between? I’m fairly certain the issue isn’t with the slicing, here.
Generally when we see pausing in prints it is a slow down in communication from the computer/SD card to the printer.
If you are printing via USB to a computer, be sure that you are not using too long of a USB cable and that you don’t have settings like a USB power save option or sleep mode enabled. Having few USB devices plugged into the computer as well can help.
If you are printing via the SD card, try to keep as few files on it as possible as the more files (or larger files) can cause the slow down in communication speed.
It sounds likely that you’re running via USB. Sometimes it just takes a reboot to fix it, but it’s likely something changed on your computer since last time it was working well. Use an SD card for best results, but make sure that as you upgrade Cura LE, that you also are updating the firmware on your printer to match, or you run into compatibility issues, particularly with startup gcode.
Gotcha. I’ll keep those things in mind next time. It’s on the latest firmware and Cura LE release. To date, I’ve never run it via USB - always on my raspberry pi / octoprint server. Good to know what was causing it, though.