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Will in Tyler, Texas listening on News-Weather-Talk KTBB and asked: "I have a monoprice select mini 3D printer and I'm having extreme trouble getting it to print anything except the sample file that came with the printer. I've looked at blogs, I've looked everywhere. Any help would be appreciated."

Will, 3D printers can be tricky at the best of times, but the Monoprice Select Mini is supposed to be an accessible model both in price and in ease of use.

Monoprice recommends that you use Cura as your 3D printing software, though the printer is compatible with others. We’ve heard of people’s troubles going away after switching to Cura, so if you’re not using that software, it may be good to try it.

If you already are using it, make sure that you export your files to your hard drive first, and then move them from there to the SD card. For some reason those files are known to sometimes get corrupted.

If you suspect that your files may be getting corrupted, you can open them up with a plain text editor. If you can find a string of “U”s at the bottom, something probably went wrong and deleting those and resaving the file may be enough to get you up and running.

About the SD card itself, it may be smart to format it or even replace it with a better quality one. We’ve read many complaints about the quality of the SD card that comes bundled in with the printer. Whether there’s any substance behind those complaints or not is debatable, but SD cards are cheap and common enough that it may be worth a try if all else fails.

Another known issue, and kind of an embarrassing one for a device that’s supposed to be new, modern tech, is that the Select Mini doesn’t seem to handle spaces in filenames too well. It turns out that the fix for many people’s printing issues was just to delete the blank spaces in the filename, or replace them with underscores.

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