TAZ 5 Froze During Long Print Job

General LulzBot TAZ
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Hello everyone, this is my first post to this forum. Our company just bought a TAZ 5 and am absolutely loving it, a big step up from my Flashforge Creator at home (which I still like a lot). I am looking forward to interacting with the members here and picking up some knowledge, and hopefully sharing at least a little.

The TAZ 5 froze about 9.5 hours into a 15 hour print job. I was driving it from a PC, with all screen savers, shutdown etc disabled. I closed my programs down for the night (except Cura) and left the PC on. A few minutes later the Taz just stopped.

After realizing it didn’t look like it would recover, I tried clicking the Z +10 button on the control window, just to see if it would respond. No response. So it seemed like it lost communication with the PC. The front panel on the TAZ still said 240 for the extruder and 110 for the bed, and it showed the fan icon running at 40% (which fan is that, BTW?)

As a last-ditch I tried unplugging and re-plugging both ends of the USB cable. After I did that, it re-connected with Cura, but did not resume printing (not surprised). However, I was then able to move the z axis. Knowing the print job was toast, I shut the whole thing down and went home.

Not super bummed, I wasn’t liking the way the print was going anyway, in terms of support features I selected. So I will probably try again tomorrow. I will most likely use a SD card so I don’t have to rely on the USB communications.

I would appreciate any thoughts or suggestions. Thanks!

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I always print right off the SD card. I can’t trust my computer from ruining a print. Lol

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The USB connection seems very intolerant of a number of issues. I find that if other USB devices change state, the USB connection to the printer will be lost. Also, it looks like static electricity can cause a loss of the USB connection. I find the best solution is to print from the SD card.
You can still control the printer via your software as long as the USB link is up, but if it does go down, the print will continue printing from the SD card. You can even reset the USB port and regain connection during the print.

Scott

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Thanks for the replies.

Scott, I appreciate your filling me in on being able to print from SD while monitoring from USB, I was wondering about that, but afraid to try it during this long print.

I do think it was a USB failure, most likely on my computer end, because I was closing out other programs. You just never know with Windows what possible negative consequences may occur.

Printing from SD now, 2.5 hours into a 12.5 hour job, fingers crossed…