Thanks for all of your suggestions, guys. It really shines some light on this crappy situation. I'm actually quite lucky I didn't burn my house down when this happened, as my printer is located in my room's closet. If the wooden frame caught fire, who knows what could have happened.

I'll take the board off the frame and analyze it some more and take some pictures when I get home. Maybe we can find a solution that won't require me buying a whole new $50-$80 board/shield. Funds are tight right now and I'm really counting on my printer being up and running to create pieces for some of my current projects. I don't really see the usefulness of a screw terminal on a vibrating machine since the potential of the vibrations loosening the screw is always a possibility. I would've preferred a pin connector like the rest of the board uses for the motors and thermistor. I also assume that it was entirely my fault for this happening since there was a very small amount of exposed wiring sticking out of the connector, creating the possibility for this issue to occur. My first solution is to modify the board's code to run the bed off of D9, which is completely unaffected. In the pins.h file, the bed runs off of '5', so I'm not sure how to go about moving it to D9. I'll eventually upgrade to a RAMBo board anyways, but I just need a quick fix in the mean time.

Thank you everyone.

EDIT [10/14/2014 @ 9:30AM]: Colin just replied with:
"I have seen that before if the heat bed is struggling to maintain the target temperature. There are a couple things that can help with this, first make sure you have insulation under the heat bed, next a heat bed relay will be the biggest help, if you get the heat bed relay you can move your heat bed to d9, if you do not get a heat bed relay d9 will quickly get damaged if trying to run the heat bed. The relay will let you reach higher heat bed temps at faster speeds, otherwise 110c may be difficult to reach.

From what I have seen in the past this is just due to very high current, not from shorting. The heat bed technically is shorting the two wires out so it can't be protected.


Here is the relay:http://www.makerfarm.com/index.php/p...bed-relay.html"