I inserted my sd card into my printer (duplicator i3 mini)
and it says card inserted but when i open the menu it says no sd card.
i am brand new to 3d printing and have never done it before so any advice would be appreciated
The SD-Card Slot has a switch that informs the mainboard when an SD card is inserted. Therefore, the firmware will display a message stating that. However, if the SD Card is damaged, or for some other reason, the mainboard cannot read it, the firmware will not display the SD Card on the menu. To troubleshoot this issue, I follow these steps:
- Try Another SD-Card
- Reform the SD-Card to FAT32 with allocation Unit Size 4096
- Rename the file to 8 characters long, such as “test.gcode” instead of “This is my file.gcode” or just “12345678.gocde”.
- Restart the printer with the SD card inserted.
If the SD Card cannot be read after following the steps above, the mainboard may be defective.
Also avoid cards over 32 gb. 16 is usually safe
Personally, I recommend that you never use an SD Card greater than 4GB for updating controller boards.
They’re just about impossible to find at major local retailers, you can get them from China, however.
Or, you can do what I do and ask friends and family for their old SD Cards:
Yes, that’s an actual 32MEGABYTE SD Card. Works great!
Some printers (like my CR-10S ProV2) doesn’t show any files with long names.
I’ve never had a problem updating firmware on 32 bit boards with a 32 bit sd card however, if you want the printer to see a smaller sd card, you can partition the drive so only the desired portion is fat32, and the rest is ntfs, which the printer can’t see.
They just like screwing us around.
Probably a grandfathered tech requirement that isn’t a high priority on the replace list.
1 Like
I think your probably right,
I have noticed with some of the newer boards, specifically from bigtreetech, I have been able to do firmware upgrades with larger capacity cards. But it seems to still be pretty hit or miss about if you can do that or not.
If you look at SD Card specifications you’ll see that as time has gone on, the data rates have increased and the high speed protocols have changed - although the base SPI interface should always work.
I did a lot of work on this eight or nine years ago and had a lot of problems with reading/writing most higher capacity cards and some what people would consider lower capacity cards.
Just to go through the protocols (when I say “works with an MCU” I mean an MCU like the ones found on a 3D printer Main Controller Board):
- SD: Up to 2GB in size. Only uses the SPI protocol. Will always work with with an MCU.
- SDHC: Up to 32GB. Uses “SD” and SPI protocols. 4GB and below should work with an MCU, but I have a few Lexor Micro SD Cards (marked “SDHC 1”) that don’t.
- UHS versions 1 & 2. Should work with an MCU.
- UHS version 3. I never found one that works with an MCU.
- Micro SD EXpress. I was never able to get one working with an MCU.
From what I can tell right now, there are only two current applications for (Micro) SD Cards only running the SPI protocol and that’s 3D printers and college level electronics/programming so I don’t expect companies to focus on ensuring SPI modes work based on this limited customer set.
You can buy Micro SD cards that are 1GB and 2GB in size from Amazon and AliExpress - I just looked and found 128MB Micro SD cards at AliExpress. As I said above, I found the best solution was raiding old digital cameras owned by friends and family - they’ll probably think you’re doing them a favour.
The best solution to the problem is to move to Main Controller Boards that don’t use SD Cards for firmware updates. Look at the BTT Pico or a board that uses “DFU Mode” updating.
I don’t think there are too many people still copying their gcode files onto an SD Card and putting it into the printer any more - I think Octoprint and Klipper has eliminated that requirement.
Sorry for the pontificating but people having problems with their SD Cards always shows up on various 3D printer forums.
1 Like
Yes I too am a huge fan of the Pico boards. I have been using them in a bunch of builds since the release and the DFU is a lifesaver!
1 Like
Samsung 16 and 32gb cards have always worked for me. Printing files from Octoprint caused buffering issues for me, leading to print defects, so I am still in the stone age using micro SD cards for all 4 of my printers.
1 Like