PronterFace with Slic3r

My SD card ready stopped working this morning, so I decided to try to use pronterface instead to do my printing. I loaded the Arduino IDE and loaded the config.ini line one by one. I then loaded pronterface and loaded the gcode file and commenced printing, I'm finding that it's incredibly stuttery to print the motors causing blobbing of the filament (this is contrast to the web interface which drew smooth lines). Am I missing something?

Hi Carnivalius - I didn't have the ethernet connection initially, and printed exclusively through repetier on my mac, or pronterface, printing through their "print" buttons and got blobby prints (as did markbee) - then Ian mentioned in irc that print quality is better when printing direct from SD card in this post [forums.reprap.org] I've got a side by side comparison of snowmen printed in repetier - the one on the left is using "print" the one on the right is using the SD interface to print within repetier. (note that repetier mac works great but repetier pc doesn't). Markbee has also pritned from SD using pronterface on the PC (same thread), but I'm not sure if there's a hang with some prints - I'd recommend you experiment with the SD interface in pronterface to get your prints back to teh quality you expect.

I presume that the movement and extrusion commands aren't synchronised properly when printing direct over usb (I can't imagine it's purely a USB data rate thing since pronterface and repetier both seem to keep the printers buffer full, and SD cards aren't a particularly fast medium but work fine) resulting in most of the filament for a line being dumped at the beginning or end of the line - as you can see in the snowman at the left in my post it ends up with cog teeth where the filament is all extruded in the same place each layer (again if it was a data rate thing, you'd not expect all of the dumping to be at the same place on each layer)

EDIT :sorry I thought you meant that the machine had stopped booting from SD, but re-reading it may be that you can't use the SD - if it can't read it at all, then I don't think you'll get better prints over USB unless there's some rethinking/ rewriting of the code :/ /EDIT

Cheers

Ray

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/21/2013 07:26AM by rayhicks.

No that's exactly right the SD card is not longer being read. I suspected it might be an "over USB" issue. I'll persevere and see what occurs. Thanks!