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why am i getting lost communication errors please?
We have been very busy with our Cadet, but also have had ‘lost communication’ errors midway, or just before the print finishes. Very annoying as the job just gets ruined. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could just continue where you left off.
This occurs whenever we print higher than 360 dpi on jobs longer than 1m.
We are using Roland ColorRip.After changing USB cables, computer etc..
We tried setting the PC to sleep only every two hours, and making sure the screen saver etc did not kick in during printing.
So far this has solved the problem.From this we figured out that there was a slight pause when the hard drive sleep setting or screen saver was about to enable, causing the ‘lost communication’
I hope this makes sense and is of some help to anyone who has the same problems.
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4 Replies
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yip.. think i heard the same problem recently mate… downloading a large file and left the comp to it.. came back and it had lost connection and machine was in sleep mode. take it off and it doesnt happen.
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Check on the Roland boards
There are a few exteniive threads on it
It has to do with file size and ntfs and FAT or something like that , I dont think its a go to sleep issue , the fact that it only happens on large files seems to indicate its a size issue.
http://www.rolanddga.com/boards/detail.asp?f=1
Look for suddenly stops printing. -
NTFS can handle large files, FAT32 cannot.
If using large files such as video, image files etc NTFS is the filing system to use. But I’d turn off rubbish like screensavers anyway, they don’t actually save the screen just interfere with the running of your computer.
Sapping its processing power and memory.
Sleep, well come on, it’s called sleep, you are asking for problems.
No sleep or screensavers on a working production computer, ever!You wouldn’t dare defragment nor burn a CD with these running parallel, heavens knows why you’d rip a costly image file printing to vinyl doing it
User error and just not understanding how your computer works, I’m afraid is your only problem.
Power management is where your problem may lie, if not your filing system and turn off those screensavers, they really are just for childrens amusement 😉 -
Just one more thing , you mention 360 DPI.
The printer represents colours as cells of dots , it can only print 8 colours (including white). These cells represent a single pixel. The machine cannot possibly really resolve more than 150 of these cells per inch (and even then its being optimistic) so in reality , you need to send a file that has 150 pixels per inch or less to the printer. SIZE is the determinant , not DPI as dpi can be set at anything you like as it relates to a display device. For example a 900 pixel by 900 pixel file will display almost 10″ square on a screen but will print about 6″ x 6″ on your 1440 dpi device (150 pixels per inch of printed output) and if you were doing medium to long distance work , you could drop the PPI (or often called LPI- Lines per inch) to 75 or less , thus the 600 x 600 file can print to 12″. If you were doing billboards , you can drop the pixels per inch output even further , to 30 or less , thus your 600 x 600 file could print to 18″ x 18″.
For the best output , a 1m x 75 cm file doesnt have to be any bigger than 6000 pixels x 4500 pixels – this translates to an UNCOMPRESSSED file size of 6000 x 4500 x 3 (RGB) – 81 megs.
The ripped files getting sent to the printer get really big , especially if you are running fades etc. Much bigger then the graphics file (can approach gb sizes or more!!!)
In terms of the printer , the RIP will work best with the most processing power it can get – it’s worth it to buy a new shiny box to process files for the printer – 2.8 gig processor the minimum.
The ideal way to print is to rip the file to a queue first and print from the queue rather than rip and print simultaneously – but for this you gonna need at least a 120 gb hd or more.
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