Happy New Year!
2016 has stirred me back up to get printing and tinkering again. Well lets say at the beginning of December 2015 I caught the bug again. I needed to print something I had wanted for a long time and just when I was about to print that famous waa waa waa waaaaaaa sound effect came into my head. Nope printer has suffered a stroke and you are not printing today! I literally spent almost 2 weeks trying to figure out why this happened. I for one am not the best trouble shooter but I had to dig in, who was I gonna call? Started with checking out the power supply, I had one just pop with sparks after it sat for awhile so that's where I started. Stupid me had the wrong voltage set on the meter, AC not DC was reading 25V. Crap I said because this is supposed to be 12V! Hey I found my problem so I thought and proceeded to use a ATX power supply I had lying around. Went thru so YouTube videos and thought I had found the right one. NOPE! Just a little advice if you are going to use an ATX power supply is NOT TO CUT ALL THE WIRES BACK YOU DON'T NEED! Sorry but it didn't work for me and I was careful not to leave any exposed wires. I capped them all with heat shrink tube and only used what I followed on the YT video. Damn thing started to smoke and good thing I didn't plug it into the Arduino Mega board. Took a step back and tested my power supply again and it was fine with the correct 12v DC output it should be.
Next I unplugged everything on the Arduino and just plugged the motors back in. I disconnected the extruder filament so it could just move and not push filament thru. I used the RAMPS 1.4 test code for the Arduino and the motors tested fine. You can find that code thru the link above down towards the bottom of the page. I then used the EPROM clear from the example codes provided by the Arduino software to clear out its memory. With me being overly cautious I always save the same files in a few different places and I could not zero in on the last know good Marlin config code I had saved. I was forced to start over and use the updated Marlin, Arduino software and then the newer Slicer and Pronterface programs. I seemed to have gotten things semi back to normal but it still isn't right to me. The motors have different tones now as they move which isn't the end of the world but those of you know when you get used to something it causes you to find out why its not the same and well you know what I mean.
I may be changing things up a bit as I would like to build a new 3D printer. The Kossel is what I want to build and looks very promising!
