Originally Posted by
DaveB
The cam I've got will do live streaming too, I just want to turn that into a timelapse movie. I suppose I could just record the whole thing what with storage as cheap as it is these days. Then just overwrite it when I start the next build. I've been throwing out junk to make room for 3D stuff lately and came across some 32Meg flash cards for some long gone digital camera. Only three orders of magnitude there vs current 32Gig sizes.
I've thought of the filament crisscross possibility, and have checked for it with each occurance of this problem. Visually, I don't see it happening. Also, the first thing I did after clearing off the build plate from this last fuzz bomb was the "Load Filiament" operation via the front panel. I would have expected that test to fail if the filament were jammed up. This filament is PLA from MakerGeeks, a US based filament manufacturer, and they seem a quality shop to me. I am an Engineer by trade, so my first assumption is nearly always that the problem is caused by my own hand. (I'm cleverly ignoring the part where I didn't design this thing.) It is possible that I've twisted the filament when mounting or unmounting it on the printer, but I've no smoking gun evidence of that yet.
At this point my current guess is that something in the extruder mechanism path is marginal. I will be taking that puppy apart again and staring at it again later today I think. Qidi support, for some reason that totally escapes me, keeps trying to assert that the issue is with S3D; That I should use MakerWare instead. That the same issue occurs with an .x3g file that Qidi sent me (untouched by S3D coder's hands) is apparently irrelevant somehow. (!!?) That it only happens on the Left extruder, and that re-starting the same print from the same SD card file, without power cycling the machine, or jiggling the filament reel, yeilds a totally successful print (sigh) is all just part of the mystery. Printer pixies, no doubt about it.