Monday, January 20, 2014

Flipping the switch - the Frankenstein moment

Recap: I've been building a Prusa Mendel 3D printer from a kit I purchased on NWRepRap.com.  The kit is fully assembled and I'm going to flip the switch for the first time.

Well, actually this thing doesn't have a switch because the power supply simply plugs into the wall socket and the output of the power supply plugs into the controller board.

I have not connected the controller board to my PC, just the power supply.  This is basically a smoke test.

I'm expecting to see nothing move and I'm hoping that nothing smokes.  Here is the Frankenstein Moment:



So basically my Frankenstein has a twitch in the extruder motor.  I tried several things to resolve this, including swapping the Pololu drivers, adjusting the current.  But ultimately the cause was the fact that the Arduino controller was not initialized and the fix was to simply upload the firmware which I will cover in another post very soon.

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