Cura 3.2.21 and Dual Extruder V3 Stalling

I just bought the Dual Extruder V3 and upgraded to Cura 3.2.21 at the same time. I am running Mac OS, computer is 4 years old. My prints are stalling out early in the print. The printer just stops, ends remain hot. I can print fine from SD, I have cleared my cache. I suspected CPU, but when I view a CPU monitor, Cura is only taking up about 30-40% of the CPU. It is a buffering issue? I noticed that if my screen saver pops on, the printer stalls. If I catch it right away, I can restart it by wiggling the mouse and deactivating the screen save. However, if I disable the screen saver, the printer still eventually stalls and stops completely.

Are you keeping an eye on the print when it eventually stalls? It is possible this is because of a different background process on the computer such as a sleep function or automatic update. Also is the model you are successfully printing through the SD card the same model and settings being used through your USB for the failed prints?

It does appear to be workload within the computer causing the fail. If I am modeling in Fusion 360, that will trigger it. But it seems to eventually fail even if I am not working on the computer. It will slow down and eventually stop. Could it be a buffering issue? It started when I upgraded to the newest version of Cura. Seems like my computer should be able to handle it though, 2014 Macbook pro, 16 MB RAM, but my 1TB SSD hard drive is 90% full, not sure if that could have anything to do…

You might consider purchasing a Raspberry Pi 3B or 3B+, a power supply, and a case for around $60 and then install OctoPi / OctoPrint. This will free up your Mac for anything you want to do while the printer prints happily. You interface with OctoPrint via a browser.

Even though this is an old thread I thought I’d jump in and say a few things. First, definitely get a pi setup to do dedicated printing, its easy and works quite well. Second, it’s very likely a USB issue, not a processor one. I’ve had this happen on a number of computers and different printers. Sometimes the USB semi goes to sleep, sometimes it sends a spurious command, sometimes its just impossible to do anything. Simplify3d added a force next command to sometimes fix the pausing brought on by this, but there can be problems beyond this. It’s a symptom of computers and USB with serial and how it’s handled is really what’s happening (at least in most cases). Sometimes it can be that the processor drops something in the thread while you’re in a high usage program, other times its something completely diff. Just that it happens.

Do I generate the gCode in Octoprint, or do I make the gCode in Cura and send it to Octoprint? Is Octoprint connected to my computer or to LAN? Thanks for the suggestion…

Generate the gcode using whatever slicer you currently use on your PC (or Mac), then upload that via a web browser to OctoPrint. OctoPrint would usually be running on a Raspberry Pi (or other Linux-based system) connected to your LAN or WiFi network.

Morgan at Lulzbot suggested this too, guess its worth a look! Thanks! And the bonus is that I get to use a rasberry, which makes me embrace my inner nerd even more haha, love to geek out on this stuff… :smiley:

Does the raspberry connect to the Taz with USB?

Yes, the Raspberry Pi is connected to the printer via USB. It’s also common to have a camera connected to the Raspberry Pi as well – both USB and the native camera are supported. I’d highly recommend using the “OctoPi” firmware image for the Raspberry Pi, as it has Octoprint, along with all the required software and drivers already installed and ready for you to boot up and configure your printer with. Much easier than installing Rasbian, and then Octoprint, and all the other requirements, etc.