Our First 3D Printer! Thrift Store Buy...

Absolutely 100% new to printing. Found at a thrift store for 15 bucks. I believe it is the R1, not R1+ or Beta.

Powered it on and attempted to connect to it and found it would not communicate, or even show up on the device manager for a COM/Serial Port.

Ordering new Arduino and Ramps boards and stepper drivers. Any input would be appreciated. Slowly educating myself.

As a side note, I also managed to fry my laptop's motherboard connecting to it a second time. I assume over voltage from the serial port, due to bad regulator/switching of power input between PSU and USB. Lesson learned. Will use a dedicated data only cable in the future.

 

I would recommend spending a little extra money to purchase an original Arduino. I've had issues using clones such as a bad regulator, not being recognized by Windows, and having to install a different type of driver on my computer to upload & edit the firmware. Aftermarket full panel displays are like this too. The cheap clones had issues with flickering, and rolling pages while the original which cost a little more was good. Which version of the RAMPS board are you getting? Some versions didn't work for me either. I've heard other members of this site complain about similar issues but they were fine when all of the parts came in the same kit even if they were clones.