Getting sporadic resets

I have an i3 variant. Been working pretty well for a couple years now. It's using an Arduino Mega with Ramps 1.4 and Marlin 1.1.0 RC7. Over the last couple days, I don't seem to be able to get through any prints due to the printer randomly resetting itself. This seems to happen at various times. It could be in the middle of a print, or just when the bed is heating up before printing, or it's also happened while in the middle of doing a mesh bed leveling. It does seem like in most cases, the heated bed is active when it happens meaning the electronics are under load.

Not sure if this is related, but yesterday on two occasions trying to print something, the printer would just stop in the middle of printing the first layer. The LCD would say "Finished", but none of my custom g-code ran that moves the nozzle to a parking position was executed.

It also seems like my LCD display gets corrupted a lot more often than it used to (Reprap Discount Controller, text based). Pressing the encoder dial button clears it up, but it goes corrupted again after a short time. With Marlin 1.0, it seems like that only happened if I was executing manual move g-code commands from the Repetier Host interface.

I've reflashed the firmware many times as I upgraded from RC6 to RC7 and had to make some tweaks. But these issues started with RC6 which I had been successfully using for a couple months.

I also tried a print from the SD card to rule out any issues with the computer or serial connection. In that case it still reset about an hour into the print.

So, it seems like this might be hardware related only I'm not sure what the most likely pieces could be. There's the power supply itself (an LED strip 12v power supply, 20A), the Mega board, the Ramps board, and I guess theoretically the LCD itself.

I guess if the power supply started going wonky, it could cause minute power disruptions though I never see any flickering. I only usually hear the change in tone as the heaters shut off and then see the Marlin splash screen on the LCD.

Anyone have similar experiences, and if so, what was the cause?

Check the connections to the power supply. If any are loose the added resistance may be enough to cause a "brown-out" when the bed and/or extruder heater kick on.

Have you looked at the gcode file to make sure it is right?

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]

Quote
the_digital_dentist
Check the connections to the power supply. If any are loose the added resistance may be enough to cause a "brown-out" when the bed and/or extruder heater kick on.

Have you looked at the gcode file to make sure it is right?

The gcode I think is fine. I'm trying different objects. The one I'm most interested in was saved in 2 formats, one for printing from Repetier, and one for the SD card.

I did find one connection on the power supply that I wouldn't exactly call loose, but it did accept some more tightening. However, after that trying to print from the SD card resulted in a reboot after about 5 layers or so.

After writing my initial message the other day, I let the printer sit with the nozzle at 230 and the bed at 120 for about 3-4 hours and it never rebooted once. I also didn't see any corruption of the LCD display.

I'll swap out the power supply today as that's the easiest thing to do first. I happen to be building another printer, so I actually have spares of everything, power supply, ramps board, mega board and even the lcd display. But changing each of those one by one and trying them is going to be tedious. So, I'm kind of hoping it's the power supply.

The LCD display bothers me a bit. When printing, it gets corrupted within a couple minutes. A quick couple pushes on the encoder button restores it, but it never used to do that before except in the case of me sending some manual commands to it. Not sure if that's the Marlin firmware that's having the issue, or something else, possibly related, maybe not. The spare one I have is not exactly the same. It's a Reprap Discount full graphic whereas the one on the printer now is the text based version.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/18/2016 06:53PM by brucehvn.