Quote Originally Posted by curious aardvark View Post
dead ? how'd it die ??
Turns out two things happened...

I thought just the steppers had died, I mean these things have done thousands of hours, and for such extended periods of time, I am not saying at all they were bad quality... after seeing stepper motors die on photocopiers after a couple of weeks, I think I did pretty well.

Anyway, I took the dead steppers (lost Z and X.. would you believe it... ok fair enough one dies.. but two??!?! how bad luck is that lol... ) and plugged them into the extruder power output and nope, completely dead (extruders were still working fine, just piling plastic up on the messed up print...)

So I decided to take a working stepper and try the output for the X and Z before I bothered checking the mega or anything else, and bam... no go. So , basically the small drivers on the RAMPS board I am pretty sure are the problem.. Now, this is not to say I don't have a spare ramps, mega and pretty much an entire flashforge in spare parts, but you know what... after the past few weeks, and considering I literally was building one I thought, lol this has to be fate...

Parts are so cheap now, to be honest I don't even know if I could ever buy a built one again. I managed to now get 2 printers for less than the flashforge cost me. I know it's been a while, but still ..

Complete rostock electronics kit... $150 delivered (and thats with the good metal hot end)
kossel printed parts - easy, takes about 300 grams of plastic.
metal rods, etc... half of it is radio control helicopter parts... carbon rods, fittings etc - even in kit its pretty cheap - buy it all in one bundle for about $200-$300...
Powersupply? a laptop powersupply or pc ATX power supply... gee how many of those have I got?