USB Cable - Quality necessary

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1

I have to tell you something about my experience:
I got several fails with my Ender 3pro communicating with octopi. Something like 20% resend and above, all the time broken prints. And I used not really bad cables to connect. But it was still better to print by SD-Card. Than I took an usual usb data cable, cut it shorten on 15cm, disconnect the black wire. I solded a wire at the metalplug on the big USB-side and wrap it with Aluminumfoil around that cable.
There no more fails or issues! The communication is perfect!
So don’t use bad and cheap cables!

Hope you understand my English, Greetings from Germany!

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4

Hello @Frickel_Fritz !

Sounds interesting!

But I'm a bit curious about this:

Usually the Red wire (+5V) is disconnected and the black (GND) is kept for proper grounding.
But as long as it works for you...

5

I’ve tried it, it doesn’t work. I had to cut he black one :slight_smile:

6

:head-scratching: Whatever Creality desires to run smoothly...

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7

There is no standard to the wire colours, so some cables don't mean much by red/black. It could still be the 5v one, just a different colour.

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8

YES! It's a shame there are so many bad cables out there and nobody can look inside.
I just had a very bad experience with an external USB hard drive. Many communication errors have occurred with the original cable. After changing the USB cable, everything works fine now.

9

The wire you soldered to the USB A shield connects to what? I believe what you have created is a shielded USB cable.

10

The wire solded is connected to the housing, see the picture.

11

I can see the wire soldered to the USB A shield in the picture you posted.

What I can't see is where that wire goes and where the other end is connected / soldered. I also can't tell if it has insulation on it.

I'm trying to get enough information from you to duplicate your cable.

12

As far as I read from the first post, it just goes to the additional shielding and no further connection on the other side

13

Yes, it’s just a blank wire wich is wrapped in the aluminum foil. It connects the foil with the outer plug to make a shield. I’ll try to make a sketch:

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14

Thank you! I believe that is what was needed to duplicate your efforts.

15

i had similar Problems ( ender 3 pro / raspberry pi 3b+ )

i did try several fixes i found on the internet ( and in this Forum :wink: ) :

  • made sure the Power supply for the pi was strong enough
  • i did try several USB cables ( some only 15cm long and heavily shielded )
  • taped up the 5V connector on the USB Cable ( to stop the printer from leaching power from the pi )
  • connected the Ground from the pi with the frame of the Printer

and all those helped but the issue didn't go away entirely...
what did make it go away was when i shielded the Ribbon cable that goes from the Printer Mainboard to the display of the Printer !
i wrapped it in Aluminium Foil and connected that to the frame ( to ground it ) and then wrapped it all up in Tape ( so it didn't come in contact with any other electronics )
pretty much the same way you did with the usb cable :wink:

apparently the Ribbon cable on der New ender 3 Pro picks up a lot of interference from the Stepper Motor

i didn't have a single resend error since :slight_smile:

16

How do you monitor resending issues on USB, to see whether your USB cable is OK?

17

Upper Left Corner of the Octoprint UI, that's what mine looks like right now:

Resend ratio: 0 / 136.1K (0%)

0 means no resends ( Good :wink: )
136,1K are the total commands send to your Printer ( in this session )

every time octoprint needs to resend a command to your printer the counter goes up.
at about 10% resent ratio octoprint gives you a warning ( but at 10% you probably already have bad print quality :wink: )

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18

While the printer is connected, you can read in the terminal. There where before a lot of „unknown commands“. After the cable fix they came very rare.

19

Johnny, with Ender 3 you have to:

  • Install „2xTemperatur fix“ plugin
  • use a proper cable

It’s not necessary to shield the cable, if it’s a quality data cable. Now I bought a new short 50cm cable. But it’s important to plug of the powerline. I did it by a small tape in the plug, like seen here:

20

I bought a high quality 3ft long Anker cable and used two ferrite core insulators on both ends. No more problems losing data.