I’m trying to use WebControl with the PC, but losing the connection continually, it locks for a while and then returns to work. What could be the reason? Thanks.
Some have reported that some USB port hardware on windows PCs are flaky and unreliable. Others have used a shorter certified USB cable length.
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Strange because I’m using the original Maslow cable. I’ll do some tests, thank you.
This is a known issues for Ground Control, and Web Control running on PC’s or on Raspberry Pi’s as a web server so you are not alone in running into this if it makes you feel any better.
In addition to what @Orob mentioned, i would recommend:
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Use the shortest length cable possible
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Route the cable away from any possible source of electrical noise.
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Use a certified USB cable, preferably one with a choke.
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Power your computer and Arduino from a separate power circuit than that of the router and/or vacuum.
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I followed your advice but it still crashes, even with the router turned off. The positive is that it does not give more errors in the movement. I have the original maslow and the upgrade M2, I would like the automatic zero for the Z axis, is it worth buying a raspberry?
I would say yes it is worth buying the raspberry especially since for both webcontrol and makerverse you can get a prebuilt image that can be downloaded and written to the SD card and then be able to plug and go with a network cable or after you set up wifi.
3B+ or 4 will work fine. That is all I use for the maslow now. No monitor on it. It acts as a server and you load the webpage from your design computer to upload gcode. Then out in the garage, I use my phone to position and then start the cut.
I found that I don’t like surprises, so the motor control board is in an easily accessible location so if things aren’t moving as I want, I can pull the power plug to the motor shield and it won’t move when I don’t want it moving. I unplug it after the cut completes, but I leave everything else on most of the time, so it is ready to go once the shield power is connected. I’m thinking I’ll put a wall light switch on the frame connected to the shield power so I don’t have to unplug it, I can just flip the switch and sled movement will stop. It won’t stop the router spinning, but the router has a power button on it and is easy to get to.
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one significant advantage of using a pi with webcontrol is that it lets you use
a very short USB cable, greatly reducing the dreaded USB disconnect problem.
it’s also, by far, the most common and tested environment.
David Lang
Reviving a dead thread, mine keeps crashing on a Rpi. Have tried using a different power source. So over this this thing in general. It is a headache every time I go to use it.
that sounds super frustrating. I just chain wrapped for the first time a couple hours ago and realized after getting it back on track the left motor chain was off one tooth for the first half of the cut…
Try deleting the log.txt file in the .Webcontrol folder because it gets too big.
are you running the RPi in CLI mode or are you running it with a desktop environment?
Will try
@Jonat I’m logging into it from my laptop. The Pi locks up completely and has to be rebooted. There is desktop environment but have no idea how to run from there. Is it possible to buy the upgrade shield from anywhere but makermade? Im aslo having problems with sled not keeping up at the top of the board…
sled not keeping up across the top of the board usually means that your power
supply is having trouble producing enough power, check if it’s voltage is
dipping below 12v in the problem area.
if you can change the pi to not run the desktop environment, it will free up
more resources for webcontrol (which pi is it?)
David Lang
@dave How do I go about checking that? its a 3b if memory serves correctly. It never shows more that 35% cpu usage.
Thank you all for the responses
it’s more a matter of ram than cpu, the desktop environment eats enough ram that
webcontrol could run the system out of memory (or into swapping, which would
look like frozen in practice)
with a 3b this makes a lot of sense.
David Lang
@ Dave How do I check Power?
a volt meter on the 12v power supply.
David Lang
If it is locking completely, mounting the sd card on a Linux machine and going into the /user/pi/.Webcontrol/ folder to delete the alog.txt and the log.txt files that are likely causing it to freeze because it has no disk swap space available will be an easier way to fix it instead of reimaging it.
With a Pi 3 there isnt a whole lot of resources available to run both web control and a desktop. I run WC on a Pi 4B - 8GB and it has a hard time running both a desktop AND the web server. Like @dlang said, its a RAM issue. Even if you are accessing WC remotely, the Pi is still running X windows and a whole host of other things that really aren’t needed for WC.
My recommendation to anyone using WC on a RasPi is when installing the pi OS, only install the light version. It’s command line only but it’s also light. The Pi can be remotely managed with an SSH client like Putty.
If you have already installed the Pi OS with desktop then you can still set the pi to boot to the command line and bypass X Windows. This should free up enough resources to keep the Pi from locking up. You can do this from the desktop on the Pi or if you can SSH into it and get to the command line you can run the Raspi configuration menu with :
sudo raspi-config
select the SYSTEM OPTIONS → BOOT / AUTOLOGIN → CONSOLE (either with passord or auto login) then reboot.
This will force the Pi to boot directly to the Command Line and bypass any desktop (and the underlying processes that are eating up your resources).
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Will test, thanks all