Extruder motor output suddenly stopped working

Hi guys.

I turned off my RoBo3D about an hour ago and turned it back on a few minutes ago and now the stepper motor output for the extruder won't work.

I've tested the motor on another output and it works, but no other motor works on the E0 output.
I've re-flashed the Arduino board with no luck.
I've swapped out the stepper motor driver with another one on the board, no luck.

Is there any other ways I can troubleshoot this issue?
Or can I change the extruder output to E1? I have no Arduino programming skills so I don't know how to do that myself, so if it's possible and somewhat easy I'd love to get some help with it.

 

Can you pull the ramps board off the arduino and see if there's any damage to a trace?

Did you happen to shock it?

What happens if you take the driver from E0 and put it on X?

I'm not sure it's possible to change to E1. I'll look at the code though.

 

There's no visible damages on either side of the Ramps board or the Arduino.

I didn't touch the board while the printer was off, so no.

I tried that. The X output still works fine with any motor and the E0 is still dead.

Thank you! I really appreciate it!

 

Go head and start a tech support request. I'm thinking if there's nothing wrong with the stepper driver or stepper motor it's probably with the ramps. If you're good at reading circuit diagrams and following traces you can use the ramps 1.4 wiki to try and see if there's a bad trace.

Switching to E1 would be a band-aid but not really offer much long term benefit.

Another thing to try is unplugging everything from the board and isolating the extruder. Just having E0 plugged in and the extruder heated. Try doing it like that.

Also verify the current on the E0 stepper driver is the same as the others.

 

Just having the E0 and a controller connected gives no result. The controller is getting 4.98 volts and I'm not sure what pins to test for the motor. Is it red and black? I don't want to short circuit anything.

Also the wire coloring on RepRap.org is red-blue-green-black where on the RoBo3D it's black-green-red-blue (or reversed blue-red-green-black) which is slightly confusing.

 

red/blue and green/black are interchangable. There's two coils on the stepper that drive forward and reverse movement and depending on which is active. Though steppers are a bit voodoo to me.

Measure the voltage from this: http://i.imgur.com/wbo9IsZ.png Though the heatsink might be blocking the v_ref point, you can also measure off the trim pot as your (+) sense.

I meant following the traces on the ramps board itself.

Some more info on tuning steppers: http://reprap.org/wiki/Pololu_stepper_driver_board
http://reprap.org/wiki/Monotronics#Adjust_the_Motors

 

The stepper motor driver is showing 0.35 volts on all axes idle. I also finished tracing and double checking all the pins on the stepper motor driver's port for the E0 and there's contact on every pin to it's end points. Maybe it's my Arudino that's defective then?

 

That's possible I suppose, but unlikely since the ramps board is a arduino protection device.

You could measure the output from the aduino to see if it's sending the correct output.

 

So, I put the printer back together and connected it via the USB cable (I got a Reprapdiscount XXL controller that I normally use) and via MatterControl I can move the extruder. Now it moves fine with the controller as well.
I guess something must have come loose or a pin had a bad connector since it now works fine again.

 

That'll happen. That's why I usually suggest taking it apart and putting it back together. Really fickle stuff

 

I'll remember that next time something stops working! Thank you Mike!

 

Same thing happened to me just last night. I'm doing a major rebuild so I tried plugging everything into the ramps and getting going. Well the arduino wouldn't boot up. Unlugging the arduino from the ramps worked. Tried again on ramps, no luck. Unplugged everything on ramps, worked.

I took a break to luck up a picture I'd taken of my ramps, somehow that ended up with being done for the night so I'm still in the middle of fixing it.

 

Ouch, that's not fun. I hope you'll get it to work again quickly.