Over the last several months I have seen many posts about dropped connections with USB to controller configurations. I had NEVER had a dropped connecting so I considered myself lucky. Well, all of a sudden I can’t even finish short jobs without the connection dropping.
I have now set up an ethernet connection and am doing testing with that but I am wondering if other people have gone from zero dropped connections to constant dropped connections when overall there was no change to hardware (I did download and install gSender V1.5.0 Edge 8).
It wasn’t a subtle change, it was sudden and extremely annoying.
Anyway, just curious if this has happened to other people or if I just won the USB lottery.
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Hi Jens,
My problems had a more sneaking in property to them, going from only sometimes when the air was dry and cold while on long laser jobs, to almost every bloody time, but not every day and sometimes only the first hours after bootup. It had me stumped for longer than it had to, for I stared myself blind on my added 10m length in the usb chain instead of the obvious weakest link. The usb cable provided with the machine.
I’ve looked with horror at the slb and its flimsy usb-c connector. At least the longboard has a proper usb-b to a. I wouldn’t connect the slb with usb longer than needed to establish eth connection. I feel that going with usb on the slb is one way to assure disconnects and frustation.
Why anyone would stick with usb when you have the option to connect via eth is beyond me.
I wish!
I have used the original cable ever since day one without an issue until now. I should put a replacement cable on it and see if that changes things.
I swapped out my USB cable after running into problems on my AltMill and they disappeared.
As reported on another thread, the replacement cable did not help and the issue was determined to be the USB-C port on the controller, most likely a defective solder joint. Unfortunately it is a surface mounted port and several degrees more difficult to repair then a through hole mounted connector. I have reached out to Sienci to see if they would do a courtesy repair/replacement since the controller is out of warranty by now. For now I am operational via the ethernet port on the controller.
Thanks for the update and I’m glad to hear that you were able to connect via ethernet.
Are you connecting the two with a cross over cable or are they both connected to your network? Odd that ethernet seems to be more reliable. Perhaps the rj45 connector is less succeptable to dust or vibration.
I assume that you have the controller connected to your network via ethernet while the panel computer is still on wifi? I am considering hard wiring both into my network and getting rid of the wifi connection on the panel computer. I was just thinking that its one less thing to go wrong…
Can’t speak for Jens or Eddie, but I’m using a regular cat5/6 cable to connect my gControl to the SLB-ext. No cross over cable required.
As for reliability of eth versus usb, it’s not just the cable/connector quality that is important but the error detection and correction that the TCP/IP protocol provides
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I have bought me an I5 del win 11 pc and installed it at the machine. I’m still running my longmill mk2 via the old longboard. It can only connect via usb.
I replaced the flims usb cable that came with the machine with a heavy duty gold plated double filtered shielded one (and a spare one in stock), and it holds up, for the moment, but I have found that a usb connection in an electrical poluted enviroment does not take much to break down. I am however raised in a time that if you can smack your device to work for a while longer, you smack it untill you smack it to kingdome come, before replacing it. I have worked around constant weird stalls for over a year before I replaced that one cable.
I bet, I could now run the machine from back in my office without problems, but for some reason, it didn’t occure to me that that small cable could be the culprit. That is untill installing the pc at the machine didn’t fix my problems.
If only someone had smacked me..
This is such a prominent problem with the Windows operating system.
The USB ports are initially set to go into sleep mode after a certain time. You need to go into settings to change the sleep mode to never.
This is so common, Sienci Labs has put this info in their gSender documentation.
I tried to change my usb port to never but could not find where. I followed Sienci Lab’s documentation but it was different on my lap top.