Extruder not feeding

[pgriffy]

EDIT: Nevermind. I'm tyring to follow the book Maintaining and Troubleshooting your 3d Printer. It was talking about calibrating the extruder and never mentioned the heat had to be turned on for the extruder to move. So now that is working. On to the next headache...

I'll start by saying I'm totally new to this and likely in over my head. I bought the Hictop 3d printer kit from Amazon. After much struggling with the cryptic installation "manual", I've finally gotten it assembled.

I can move the x, y, and z axis from the control panel, no problem. When I try to move the extruder, nothing. The first thing I did was checked the voltage for that motor. I got 0.84v DC for x, y, and extruder motors, z was 1.03v DC. So I at least know power is getting to the right place on the board.

The next thing I did was unplugged x and extruder from the board and plugged the extruder in x. I then went through the menu and moved the x axis and the motor did move. So at least I know the cable and motor appear to be working properly.

Now I'm a bit stuck. I don't know if it is the board or the firmware causing the problem. I'm assuming i can use the multimeter on one or more of the pins of the motor to see if the board is sending current to it when I tell it to move, but that's above my scope of understanding.

The documentation didn't include the brand of electronics or the version/type of firmware. I've attached a picture of the board if that helps.

I'm dying to print something. It hasn't helped that this arrived right after I had shoulder surgery, so I'm a bit loopy from the pain meds and one hand short.

If someone can point me to a good resource for figuring this out, I'm happy to read and learn. I'm just a bit overwhelmed right now and have no idea what to even call things to search for answers. Thanks in advance!

[printbus]

Are you trying to drive the extruder motor with the hot end cold? If so, most if not all firmware will prevent you from doing that - otherwise you'll either damage something or chew up the filament since filament can't be extruded through a cold hot end. If you're controlling the printer from host software, sending command M302 (allow cold extrude) to the printer should let you test the extruder motor with the hot end at room temp. Of course, you don't want to have filament loaded when you're doing this.

[pgriffy]

Thank you. So much to learn I don't know where to start. I did get the motor working by heating up the hot end.

[printbus]

...The documentation didn't include the brand of electronics or the version/type of firmware. I've attached a picture of the board if that helps.

BTW, that picture seems to be a variation of the MKS base. http://reprap.org/wiki/MKS_BASE

But there's still some confusion. Your board is marked as a v1.3 board and has the stepper drivers integrated onto the board. Searching the web for MKS boards, other v1.3 boards require separate drivers to be plugged onto the base board.