I tried printing with PETG yesterday, and I noticed that it intermittently stops moving during the print for a few seconds. It doesn’t throw an error or anything, just stops and then after a few seconds resumes as if nothing happened. But this creates huge blobs where it stops. It only happens when printing PETG, not PLA. Could this be caused by a filament setting in my slicer? I’m using prusa slicer. I inspected the gcode and there are no stops, pauses or color changes etc. in it. The behaviour happens both when printing from octoprint and directly from SD card.
Edit: these random intermittent stops are 10-20 seconds long, causing massive blobs from oozing filament.
Edit 2: so it seems to not actually be a PETG specific issue, but rather a model size/speed issue. I can get it running without stops if I just reduce print speed. When I crank speed to 100% I start getting these weird 10-20 second long stops.
So I’m overloading the controller with a lot of gcode commands in rapid succession? I’m running at slightly lower than manufacturer default Max.
SOLVED: the gcode resolution was set too fine, I increased it from 0.0125mm to 0.5mm as described here and the stuttering disappeared.
If it’s fine with PLA then my money is on profile issue. Use your PLA profile, and just change the temperature. If that works okay, start tuning for PETG from that point. And delete the old PETG settings.
I did some more testing, also with different slicers, and it seems to not actually be a PETG specific issue, but rather a model/speed issue. I can get it running without stops if I just reduce print speed. When I set speed to 100% I start getting these weird 10-20 second long stops.
So now in thinking it’s the controller locking up because it’s overloaded by too many small movmeent gcode commands in rapid succession?
Yeah I had an issue with this trying to print some ornaments in vase mode. I adjusted the cura profile as detailed HERE and it seemed to take care of it.
Yeah maybe that’s what’s causing my issue, although it’s a bit more extreme in my case than his. I’ll definitely give that a try.
That solved it, printing with PETG was just a strange coincidence then, but I’ve never seen this before.