The Death of a RAMPS

The time has come–I’ve blown up my Arduino. It’s a sad day for any newbie, hobbiest, or professional when their pride and joy decides to stop working. The thing is, it could have been prevented, and I just failed to take the proper care in order to preserve the fine balance of sort of working sometimes to not working at all.

For the past few days, I’ve been having some problems with driving the steppers on my X and Y axis. I suspect the drivers are close to blown. But anyway, prints have been leaning in both directions, so I decided to tune the trimpots on the driver boards. This seemed to fix the leaning for a bit, but during another print, the leaning started again. So, I decided to replace one of the drivers. This probably would have fixed the problem–had I plugged in the driver the right way.

Yeah, point, laugh, I deserve it. I made such an amateur mistake! Normally, the drivers should be flush with one another, so that they plug in the right way; however, it being early in the morning when I was working on the printer, I lacked the cognitive ability to make sure of such things. I plugged in the driver the wrong way, with the two pins on the very end of the board hanging off of the header. This killed the Arduino the RAMPS was plugged into. No power LED. No detection from each of the three computers I tested it with. All disappointment.

this thing has caused me hours upon hours of stress–further proving my point that the printer hates me

I knew it was time to purchase a new controller board. To Google, I went, to research the best controller for my poor little printer. The Smoothieboard is an interesting character, with its ARM processor, which negates the need to run OctoPrint from a separate computer; however, its price is less than appealing. I then turned to the Printrboard, but its lack of separate stepper drivers was a bit of a terrifying prospect, as I have a tendency to fry drivers (see previous paragraphs). The Sanguinololu was the next option. But I was unhappy with its lack of support for a heated bed, which I’ve become accustomed to. My final decision, I feel, was made purely out of convenience: I turned back to the RAMPS. It’s outdated, I know, but, because of its cheap price (of course, without an official Arduino), I couldn’t say no. I found a kit on Amazon which included a RepRap Discount Full Graphic Display, along with some extra drivers, which I will keep as a nice extra, as well as a clone Arduino board. In addition, I bought some new stepper drivers (this time, the DRV8825, as opposed to the A988, for its quieter sound and all around shiny newness).

My new board and drivers are in the post, and should soon be in my sweaty palms, as I wait in nervous anticipation to get this thing up and running again. Stay tuned!