Given my soldering skills and crappy iron, I shouldn't be allowed anywhere near my RAMPS board. However, recently I decided to remove the barrel jack from my Arduino Mega clone (without any kind of desoldering wick) as it was preventing my RAMPS board from sitting flush and I never needed it. Afterwards I put the boards back together, updated my Arduino IDE to 1.61, and got a bunch of timeouts when trying to load some new firmware. Eventually was successful after downgrading back to 1.06.
However, given that I recently started getting timeout errors again as well as having my printer pause mulitple times before stopping completely, I am thinking I might have overheated the USB interface or bootloader during my desoldering. While I stopped using the 12864 Full Graphic LCD on my Rostock Mini to prevent overburdening the 8-bit processor, I did leave the SC card enabled in the firmware and decided to try experimenting printing from it, rather than my laptop. Below are some of my observations.
- The SD card on my LCD can be used without the LCD being configured. My LCD simply lights up when it gets power even though nothing is being drawn on the screen. It is possible only one ribbon cable is needed, but I just connected both of them.
- FAT32 formatted, 8GB cards can be used. Specifically, I am using a Kingston micro SDHC card with an adapter.
- Filename formatting matters. At first I was having problems not finding the files I saved to the SD card through Repetier-Host because I failed to provide an extension when naming the files. Once I added a *.gco (rather than *.gcode) file extension, I had no problems finding files and printing from the SD card. Although limited to an 8.3 filenaming convention, the one *.gcode file I manually loaded via an adapter was successfully found and printed as KELI~1.GCO or something like that.
- I did try a 128MB SD card which did not work. However, I think I might have spotted the DCIM folder on the card and I did try the card prior to figuring out the filenaming rules.
- Printing from an SD card via Repetier-Host without a working LCD screen will not give you any information about the printing time, only the percentage of the print completed off of the SD card. Still had information on the hotend temperature and such though.
