Trouble with new board

So I am new to the scene of 3D printing although I catch on quick. I bought a printer HICTOP PRUSA i3 Aluminum. Anyway I wanted to add auto bed leveling and I wanted to put a better board on the machine, the one that was on there looks really cheap. I Purchased the sainsmart 2-in-1 printer board (ArduinoMega+Ramps 1.4) basically. I bought the recommended motor drivers. Then I purchased a Raspberry pi and set that up on octoprint to control the printer via wlan. With a few hangups here and there getting the two boards to connect and getting everything wired, I soon had everything ready to go. I powered the printer up and tried moving the motors and I simply get buzzing and the motor tries to move and sometimes moves a little bit. If i try to move the motor then help with my hand the motor will move either direction (Example: If i want the motor to move the X axis left and try to help it with my fingers it will go left as long as i help it BUT if i keep trying to move the motor left and turn the motor right with my fingers it will easily go right. All this while still buzzing. Adjusting the POT on the motor controllers has proved not effective for me in this case. The power supply "says" its putting out 12v at 20AMP. Thanks

It's odd that your motors don't have an explicit direction. It kind of sounds like a firmware configuration error. Like somewhere in your configuration.h you have the motor ESteps set up wrong. Are you using standard NEMA 17 2 pole motors? Direct to shafts or belts/pully's?

Your potentometers are also smart to check. Typically, .5v is a good place to start however you can go as high as you want. The only constraint is your motor driver temperatures, which you can gauge just by touching.

What kind of firmware are you running on your control board?

Your speed is too fast. When the pulses are arriving like that then you can help it either way and it iwll easily move. Slow it right down and try again. Increase the maximum slowly until it stops moving and buzzes then back it off a bit. You should have acceleration set very low to being with.

I think they are nema 17 2 pole (4 wires Green blue black and red I forget I'm at work right now). X and y are belt and z is direct. The firmware is Marlin. I'm still learning so I will definitely slow them down and adjust to .5 volts on the POT. Thanks!

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Originally Posted by ckp343

I think they are nema 17 2 pole (4 wires Green blue black and red I forget I'm at work right now). X and y are belt and z is direct. The firmware is Marlin. I'm still learning so I will definitely slow them down and adjust to .5 volts on the POT. Thanks!

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Yep, those are 2 pole. The common stepping for those is 80 steps/mm. It's pretty obvious where it is in the Marlin Config.

Before you dedicate a lot of time in Marlin, I also recommend Repetier firmware. It's a newer, supported firmware that a lot of people have been transitioning too.

Accelerations are typically in the 1000-4000mm/s^2 range just to give you an idea.

Hey guys, so after hours of trying to get all the settings right I didn't have any luck with repitier. I probably shouldn't have bought such a cheap first printer. I rewired all the connections and plugged the original board back in and setup octoprint on it and found that now my lcd screen won't read the sd card files anymore to print but i can upload them through octoprint so no worries there. The only problem I have now is that I cannot get the extruder motor to run whatsoever. If I plug the connector into one of the axis and move that axis the motor will operate, so I know the motor is fine. In octoprint where you can control the printer there is no option under select hotend..... does this have any relation to why the extruder doesnt extrude?

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Originally Posted by ckp343

Hey guys, so after hours of trying to get all the settings right I didn't have any luck with repitier. I probably shouldn't have bought such a cheap first printer. I rewired all the connections and plugged the original board back in and setup octoprint on it and found that now my lcd screen won't read the sd card files anymore to print but i can upload them through octoprint so no worries there. The only problem I have now is that I cannot get the extruder motor to run whatsoever. If I plug the connector into one of the axis and move that axis the motor will operate, so I know the motor is fine. In octoprint where you can control the printer there is no option under select hotend..... does this have any relation to why the extruder doesnt extrude?

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I doubt it has anything to do with the cost of the printer. We're all about low cost...well, a lot of us haha.

What was the original control board? Just a standard Arduino Mega 2560 with Ramps 1.4? What is the exact model of the sainsmart board you got?

Staying on the topic of the Sainsmart w/ Repetier, what did not work? You could not figure out a firmware configuration that yielded any movements? Z-Probe didn't work?

Do you use Marlin as your stock firmware? What version of the Arduino compiler do you use? 1.0.5 is the only version that can correctly compile a lot of the Marlin firmware versions. Maybe that's the new source of your Extruder motor issues. That, or maybe a motor driver kicked the bucket. Are all your motor pots set to .5v?

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Originally Posted by LuckyImperial

I doubt it has anything to do with the cost of the printer. We're all about low cost...well, a lot of us haha.

What was the original control board? Just a standard Arduino Mega 2560 with Ramps 1.4? What is the exact model of the sainsmart board you got?

Staying on the topic of the Sainsmart w/ Repetier, what did not work? You could not figure out a firmware configuration that yielded any movements? Z-Probe didn't work?

Do you use Marlin as your stock firmware? What version of the Arduino compiler do you use? 1.0.5 is the only version that can correctly compile a lot of the Marlin firmware versions. Maybe that's the new source of your Extruder motor issues. That, or maybe a motor driver kicked the bucket. Are all your motor pots set to .5v?

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Haha I hear you there, but this board just looks cheap. I honestly have no idea what board it is MPX .1 Base V1.3 thats all the board says.... its red in color. The sainsmart board is the 2-in-1 printer controller. I couldn't figure out the settings for movement, I'm short on time was suppose to have sunday off but ended up fighting a fire that went on for five miles. I have no idea what is on the printer board right now i did not program it. The arduino compiler is the IDE from arduino the newest one on their site. The motor works i know that. The driver may have kicked it the only issue is the drivers on this board are built in. to switch to E1 on the extruder i would need to reflash the board but then i will lose all the settings it has.

As a side note as well I stumbled across the fact that when I have the factory board plugged in only to the PC, I can read the card files but cannot move the motors because simply there is not enough power. BUT when I plug the board into the power supply the SD card reader gets all goofy and everything moves except the extruder. I found all of the settings under "control" in the LCD screen and entered them into the sainsmart but it seems like it doesn't work well with it even though everything is right. I odered a RAMPS 1.4 from amazon and I have an Arduino Mega so maybe i'll give that a shot!

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Originally Posted by ckp343

Haha I hear you there, but this board just looks cheap. I honestly have no idea what board it is MPX .1 Base V1.3 thats all the board says.... its red in color. The sainsmart board is the 2-in-1 printer controller. I couldn't figure out the settings for movement, I'm short on time was suppose to have sunday off but ended up fighting a fire that went on for five miles. I have no idea what is on the printer board right now i did not program it. The arduino compiler is the IDE from arduino the newest one on their site. The motor works i know that. The driver may have kicked it the only issue is the drivers on this board are built in. to switch to E1 on the extruder i would need to reflash the board but then i will lose all the settings it has.

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First - I would stick with your sainsmart board at all times. It's just a better, more common controller board. Spend the time getting that to work before ordering anything else. That's my opinion at least.

I know it sucks that you lose all settings during a re-flash, but like I say, you'll need to know them eventually if you're serious about 3D printing. At some point you're going to need to reflash your firmware.

A LOT of people have reported issues with marlin when it's compiled with any Arduino IDE later than 1.0.5. You MUST use this 1.0.5 to compile if you want to use Marlin: http://arduino.googlecode.com/files/...r2-windows.exe. There's a good chance some of your issues are just from garbled code somewhere because you used latest. Also, I highly recommend you wipe the EEPROM before uploading any new firmware versions. There is already a script for this in "File->Examples->EEPROM" in the Arduino IDE program.

Lastly, if you establish a decent understanding of your firmware settings then I highly recommend you check out Repetier. It's free, and is less outdated than Marlin. Plus, it has a great little configuration tool that makes it easy to set up: http://www.repetier.com/firmware/v092/. Aaaaaaand you can use the latest Arduino IDE to compile/upload it.

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Originally Posted by LuckyImperial

First - I would stick with your sainsmart board at all times. It's just a better, more common controller board. Spend the time getting that to work before ordering anything else. That's my opinion at least.

I know it sucks that you lose all settings during a re-flash, but like I say, you'll need to know them eventually if you're serious about 3D printing. At some point you're going to need to reflash your firmware.

A LOT of people have reported issues with marlin when it's compiled with any Arduino IDE later than 1.0.5. You MUST use this 1.0.5 to compile if you want to use Marlin: http://arduino.googlecode.com/files/...r2-windows.exe. There's a good chance some of your issues are just from garbled code somewhere because you used latest. Also, I highly recommend you wipe the EEPROM before uploading any new firmware versions. There is already a script for this in "File->Examples->EEPROM" in the Arduino IDE program.

Lastly, if you establish a decent understanding of your firmware settings then I highly recommend you check out Repetier. It's free, and is less outdated than Marlin. Plus, it has a great little configuration tool that makes it easy to set up: http://www.repetier.com/firmware/v092/. Aaaaaaand you can use the latest Arduino IDE to compile/upload it.

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Thanks! I'll give it a go tonight and I'll let you know!

5x StepStick DRV8825 Stepper Motor Driver Module for 3D Printer Reprap RP A4988

does it matter that i am using these stepper motor drivers? I feel like there is something else wrong here, no matter how many settings i put in the motors just don't ever work. buzz and jump is all they do..... i can get them to start to move a little but they just won't run. really frustrated on this one

It does not matter except that for the various driver boards that are available there are some differences that you need to check.

The various driver boards will either do 32 microstepping or 16 microstepping maximum. Make sure that you have the jumper settings set correctly for your driver board otherwise it will move too far / not far enough and may not move at all if you have it set incorrectly. You need to download the chip datasheets and check the jumper settings.

The current and reference voltage have a different relationship between the 8825 and the 4988.

https://www.pololu.com/product/2132

Towards the bottom of the page there is a good explanation of the differences.

Ok so I have the RAMPS board wired up and programmed, there are two power inputs, a 5 amp and an 11 amp, my power supply states that it puts out 20 amp. When I plug power into the 11 amp nothing happens, the board does not come to life. When i plug power into the 5 amp the board comes to life and everything works!!! I can move all the axis and everything seems stable I checked all the voltages... NOW MY NEXT PROBLEM, when I chose to print, nothing happens, it doesn't heat anything up... so I tell it to preheat the PLA, it starts to preheat the Nozzle and the BED and it starts to get things heated up and then the screen goes dim and the temp drops and thats it. time after time. I tried jumping the 11 amp and the 5 amp from the same power supply but it doesnt help its like the 11 amp doesnt work on the board...