My Taz 6 was in the middle of a print and I happened to brush my hand against it, causing a pretty decent static shock. Well, this caused the print to stop, and the printer shut off and came right back on. Has anyone had this issue? If so, does anyone know of a way to ground the machine?
Thanks.
Hello and I’m sorry to hear about the experience you’re having with your printer.
Can you give us a little more of the background of what happened during the situation. The more information the better in this case.
Thank you,
I often have this problem on my TAZ 5, just touch the printer and it reboot. I do a lot of static, it’s not the printer, but it doesn’t like it…
Daniel,
Might I ask when your house was built? Is your house properly grounded?
In 1959, the NEC required houses to move from 2 prong outlets to 3 prong, grounded outlets. If your house was built before 1965, I would suspect that as a possible problem.
Actually, my printer is plugged into a battery backup with full surge protection. Keep in mind that it is winter, and the air in my basement is very dry. Everything I touch down here gives off a static shock. When I touched the printer, it gave off a hellacious shock and it was close to the screen, then it shut off and came right back on. The print stopped, so I had to restart it.
My house was built in 2012, shouldn’t be a problem. Thx.
If you look at the assembly info for the Taz 6 control box https://ohai.lulzbot.com/project/taz6-control-box-assembly/taz-6/ it’s pretty well grounded at multiple points. I’m not sure how you would really add much more in the way of grounding to it. I’ve never managed to static zap mine Taz 3-ish version which has been upgraded to a similar grounding setup, and I tend to emit quite a lot of static for some reason. The only thing I can think of is if the LCD isn’t designed with adequate grounding in, which would be a problem with the whole fleet of fullgraphic LCD type LCD’s. I do know they have one other existing flaw in that they will eventually develop a dark pixle spot right over the SD card hole, so it wouldn’t surprise me if grounding could be improved there. I’m not sure how you would go about doing that short of rebuilding that circuit though. My LCD is positioned so I hardly ever brush by it, but the LCD does have control inputs and essentially a DB9 serial bus, so static could definitely be a concern there. I’d be curious what an inline anti static device would do there though. It still should be ground anyway through the motherboard though.
Same thing happens on my Taz 5. Very susceptible to static. Wool socks over carpet in winter…no, no.
I wear fire retardant clothing during the day which builds up incredible amounts of static charge. It was common to reset the printer just by drawing an arc off the ungrounded folding table. My TAZ 6 is now on a grounded steel workbench. I still discharge myself to the table before touching the printer.
I redrew the bottom PCB of the GLCD controller in KiCad a few months ago. I added a zener IC (UCLAMP0504A.TCT) to protect against ESD events on Vcc, LCDE(SCLK), LCDRW(SID), and LCDRS(CS) lines of the display. Also, the through holes which are used for mounting the encoder have thermal reliefs to the ground pour so the metal surrounding the encoder is grounded.
You can find the latest rev of the PCB here: http://devel.lulzbot.com/electronics/GLCD/v0.7/
Ooooohhhhh definitely interested in buying a couple of those! Neat!