What is unreliable?

Una, my Ultimaker printer has been very busy over the last week. We’re doing a “Build a robot in a day” course and we need 15 sets of printed parts for the robots. Up until today she was printing beautifully, and I made the mistake of thinking “My goodness, the printer is working well”. Bad move. She promptly stopped dead in the middle of a print. Oh well.

It made me thing a bit about what we regard as reliable. The way I see it, as soon as a thing fails once you have to regard it as unreliable. There are not that many “acts of god” that can come out of the blue and stop something from working just one time. What usually happens is that you either face up to the fact that something is broken at the first point of failure, or you spend the next few weeks discovering just how broken it is.

I think I’ve traced the problem to the SD card that I was using, which might be going a bit “soft”. That or the memory card connector in Una. I’m thinking about installing Octoprint and removing the need for SD cards.

And I’m trying really hard not to think how well things are working…..