Quote Originally Posted by Stwert View Post
I'm using an old iPhone with the Manything app, 24/7 free live streaming (so long as you've and old or spare device to use as a cam) but it works great, I can check on my print progress any time any where.

@DaveB

As Steve also said, I've had this happen to me once and it was because the filament had managed to get crossed over on itself, likely, or completely my fault, I must have let go of it when loading and allowed it to get loose on the spool allowing the crossover to happen.
When it does, sooner or later the filament will knot itself up and cause problems like this.

If that is the problem, nothing short of completely respooling the whole lot (what I did) but you need to be damn careful and not let it get loose when you're doing it. Or, unwinding the filament carefully, keeping it taught until you get to the point where it knots. Then cut off the loose stuff and uncross the lines of filament where the knot happened. Will prevent it from happening again, because if that's the problem it will definitely happen again.

I may be teaching my granny to suck eggs there, what do I know, I'm newish
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.