Unable to read from USB drive

I plugged in a USB drive with a gcode file, and SM2 is not recognizing the drive. It says the USB drive size is zero with no files in it. Clearly this sounds like a drive failuire, except that it works fine on a regular computer.

I saw in the discussion group that the SM2 comes with a flash thumb drive. I do not recall seeing such a thing in my package.

I also tried plugging in my Android phone via a USB cable, and enabled file transfer. Normally the host should recognize it as a storage device. SM2 did not recognize it as a drive in this case.

The only way I could upload my gcode was from a laptop running SM Luban software and connecting over wifi.

Any ideas?

Drives need to be formatted as FAT32. (think there’s a size limit on drives, but can’t remember what it is)
For 3d the file needs to end in .gcode, cnc .cnc, laser .nc. Otherwise the SM won’t acknowledge it.
The drive that comes with it is in a little plastic case and looks like a chrome/silver whistle.

-S

As for why the Android device didn’t work, unless you have a much older one, it was probably presenting as an MTP device or something rather than normal USB storage. There would have been no reason to include an MTP driver on the Snapmaker controller.

The USB drive you tried was likely formatted as exFAT (or NTFS, etc.), which will work fine on Windows, but not on the Snapmaker.

The FAT32 format requirement would have been a nice thing to mention on the manual. I wasted several hours trying different USB drives.

I had a similar issue today. Need to run a large file. I run all my gcode files from USB. The touchscreen read the drive. Everything but the gcode files showed up. Thought the drive was bad, tried several of them with no luck. Cycled the snapmaker off and on. First time no luck. Second time I waited about 10 minutes and restarted. problem went away. I had to do some cable management around the USB port for clearance. A wire touching the thumb drive could loosen the port. Stuff like this has happened in the past, such as the app crashes. Got the 350 several years ago with no issues till recently. Afraid to update firmware…