Small CNC is Red tagged. Controller won’t recognize USB thumb drives. Charlie is coordinating with James.
Our handheld controller won’t read USB 3.0 thumb drives.
Check that you’re using an older USB Type A thumb drive prior to Version 3.0. The way you can tell is by looking inside the connector at the color of the insert. USB Versions 1.1 and 2.0 have black plastic while 3.0 has blue plastic.
We have older thumb drives you can use in the collet box. Just copy your cut files onto the PC then copy them onto the older thumb drive. Those files will be visible to the controller.
Here’s what the telltale blue plastic looks like:
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That’s good to know. I was having trouble last week with Swift’s controller reading drives. It would get stuck on the “please wait for reading…” screen. Had to unplug/plug two or three times before it would stick.
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The Small CNC was reading files as expected when I tried it at the shop. If you load a drive and try to load a file quickly, you get no file error. I loaded the drive and gave it about 10 seconds and the files worked. Ran a test cut fine. Tried multiple drives with success. Removing the red tag.
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Thanks all. Rob, Charlie and I tried all of the above, including verifying to ASMBLY thumb drives had files on them. Weird.
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I ran into this issue tonight and found out that if I shut the controller down, then boot it back up with my drive inserted, it’s able to read it. If I insert my drive while it’s powered on, the controller thinks its empty (no matter how much time I give it). Luckily it keeps your home position between power-offs.
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Good info about the controller not reading USB 3.0 drives, thanks.
FYI, the “blue plastic rule” is a decent guideline, I think, but it’s not really a hard rule. Unfortunately, the USB standards on such things are very inconsistently enforced. Especially when it comes to cheap-o thumb drives (or even some fancy ones like the ultra-compact designs), they might use blue or other colors randomly.
TL;DR: Sounds like if you end up with a USB key that the controller can’t read but your computer can, try another key.
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