Stopping during prints

I built my first printer, a Prusa I2, and it was a lot of fun. I was having problems with the printer stopping randomly during a print. I switched to a short usb cable and was able to print the parts for my I3. Then the problem returned. It will print for anywhere between a few minutes, to maybe an hour before stopping. The heater usually stays on, and melts into the part where it is parked. I'm using mattercontrol, and sometimes the program will just shut itself down. Other times it just kind of crashes, and I have to log out to get out of it. Many other times, it will have switched ports. I have to edit my printer and change from 0 to 1, and it reconnects without a problem. I'm using Ubuntu and Marlin firmware. I have tried three different usb cables, taping the cables in place, two power supplies, a fan blowing directly on my ramps board, different software:repetitive host, many different files, swearing, praying, ignoring it, and none of them seem to work. Any ideas on what I should try next? I'm hoping my new printer is slightly more reliable. Thanks, and please enjoy a picture of many failed attempts at an extruder,

Hi, welcome to the forum.

I'd recommend you sidestep the whole issue by getting an LCD with SD card reader. It should make things a lot more reliable and frees up your computer for other things.

Seconded!

If you gotta run host software, plug the computer and the printer into the same power outlets. I have heard that sometimes a ferrite bead on the USB cable will help, too.

I always print from SD cards. USB is a very flaky interface to deal with, especially if you're running a windows computer.

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

Thanks. The lcd that came with my ramps shorted out at the adapter the first time I plugged it in, which makes me wonder about the quality of the other electronics. It looks like it's back to Amazon for me. Thanks for the quick info. Here's a pic of the adapter after it was plugged in,

I use the same adapter on my RAMPS board with no problems like this.
Although I check all new electronics for bad soldering before I use it.

I had that same problem when i started with my I2. it ended up being the Baudrate. it was set to 250000 and I changed it to 125000 and it never happened again.

im about to make the move to the SD card too

I've just started experiencing the same problem myself. At first I thought USB because I was getting a communications error. I replaced the cable, the same problem happened about 5 mins into a 10 minute print. BTW I hate USB anyway, technically it was rubbish to start with, and the so-called upgrades have done nothing to improve what started life as a pile of junk. OK not USB. I decided to check the firmware (Marlin) by printing from SD, same issue. So I tried to re-install Marlin, no communication, unable to read from processor, repeated 5 times and it re-installed, still same print issue. OK now I've discovered a re-set button on the board, I've pressed that a couple of times. Now I'm going to do a re-install or Marlin and see where we go from there.