In some rare occasions, the connection to the printer is lost in the middle of a print job resulting in a print failure. While in some rare cases this could be traced down to a problem in the AstroBox software, the most common causes are Hardware or Printer Firmware related. Here's a list of things to check:
- Inappropriate Power Supply to the Pi: We recommend a power supply of at least 2.5A (or 2500mA). Anything lower will cause your Pi to loose power and reboot under heavy loads. The Pi won't care that you're in the middle of a print. It's not only us, you can see here what the Raspberry Pi Foundation recommends for the different types of Pis. https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/faqs/ (Look for WHAT ARE THE POWER REQUIREMENTS)
Phone charges or very cheap Power Supplies are likely to cause problems. Monitor the RED Led on your Pi, it should not be blinking. - Bad USB Cable: The USB cable that you use between your 3D Printer and your Pi should be as short as possible, shielded and using ferrite beads on the ends. It should also not be routed near your printer's motor or heater cables. A cheap bad cable or wrong routing will surely make for some fun random failed prints. Invest in a good quality cable if your printer doesn't already have one.
- External software accessing the port: Our official Pi image certainly doesn't do this, but make sure you haven't installed any software on your pi that might be trying to access the serial port your printer is connected to. We can't reliably communicate to the printer if another program is consuming half the messages.
- Faulty or underpowered controller board: The controller board on your printer could be broken ( or about to break ) and act erratically by not processing incoming commands fast enough or even disconnecting the port randomly. This could also happen if it's underpowered, perhaps because your printer power supply is starting to fail.
- Printer Firmware or protocol problem: If you checked all the above ( but please do check, experience tell us that it's most likely one of those items ), it's possible that either the firmware or the protocol used are causing the problems. In order to diagnose this, we would need to look at your printer communication logs. These are not active by default because they generate lots of data. You can activate them on "Settings" -> "Advanced" -> "Turn on serial logs", have the problem happen again so it can be logged and use the option in Advanced Settings to send those logs to us with an explanation of what's happening. We will look at them and figure out where to go from there.