Hi,
I’m a brand new user so my apologies if I’m not including enough info to help as I’m not sure what the right info is. Here is my setup and problem.
I am running Platform IO IDE in Atom on a Windows 10 desktop computer with plenty of processing power. I’m trying to build a firmware file for my SKR 1.3 for my 3D printer. I’ve got it where I want it configuration wise so I click the build checkmark in the left hand bar. It starts building and my computer ramps up. About midway through the build my computer crashes and turns off. Looking in Task Manager the CPU spikes up to 99% and the RAM used by the process is about 1300MB. I’ve tried doing the same thing with the IDE in VSCode and I get the same result. It had popped up with a few errors initially but I’ve fixed those. Now it looks like it is running the same as I’ve seen in videos but crashes my PC at some point in the middle.
What steps can I take to figure out why this is crashing my computer and how to fix it?
Thank you!
If your computer crashes, then your computer has a hardware problem or you have encountered a Windows or driver bug. Atom, Visual Studio Code and PlatformIO do not run as privileged processes so they cannot crash your computer unless there is a bigger problem.
My first guess is a hardware problem: an overheating problem, overclocked memory etc. So you might be better off asking in a forum dedicated to Windows computers.
It is to be expected that the CPU goes to 99% as the build system tries to fully load all CPUs to achieve a short build time. If the RAM usage is for Visual Studio Code, it’s a bit on the high side. Make sure you close all unneeded terminal views in VSC as they can accumulate a lot of output and increase memory consumption. You also want to avoid verbose output for big projects.
I assume you are trying to build the Marlin firmware. For the default environment LPC1768, it takes about a minute on my Mac and about two minutes on my PC (difference mainly due to virus scanner). And I observed a memory consumption of about 800 MB (with Visual Studio Code).
If you want to go slow and safe, you can build the project with the -j option:
pio run -j 1
It limits the building to a single job at a time and should reduce the burden for your computer. Give it a try. If you have a hardware problem, this might circumvent it.
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Thank you for the reply. I’ve had a crash during Cura slicing now that I think about it so I’ll probably need to do some tinkering with my computer to figure out what’s up there.
If I decide to try the slow and safe method, where would I add the -j option? I’m launching the build from Atom by clicking the little checkmark at the left.
Thanks again!
I’m not familiar with Atom. In Visual Studio Code, you can open a new terminal (Terminal > New Terminal) and run the command from there.
It might also be possible to specify it in platformio.ini but I haven’t found it with a quick search in the documentation.