Hello,
I'm the (almost) happy owner of a prusa i3 with RAMPS 1.4, that has never wanted to work. I was having some weird voltage issues where arduinos would get fired if I connected them to my PC, so today I tried a different approach. After reading quite a lot on the topic (and boy, was it difficult to gather information...) I carefully desoldered D1 so that I could power my Arduino straight from my computer without experiencing magic smokes or similar.
Since I was full of old RAMPS and fried Arduinos, I did my experiments. Everything seemed to work fine, at least no smoke was rising at any stage. So I connected RAMPS to my working arduino, plugged the 12v in and connected the Arduino through USB to a Mains adapter, just to see if everything worked fine. The printer turned on, no smoke, no fire. Then I connected the USB cable to my PC. And the LCD (I'm mounting a Full Graphic Smart Controller) started flickering on and off, without displaying anything. Also, the USB cable (the same I was using before) started to slowly heat up.
So I don't know what I should do... I'm still not able to talk to my printer. Also, if I try to use the display controller while on mains and tell it to home all axis, nothing will happen, it just freezes.
What could it be? A broken Arduino? Broken RAMPS? Both? Or is it just me completely missing the point here?
Thanks in advance!
I'm the (almost) happy owner of a prusa i3 with RAMPS 1.4, that has never wanted to work. I was having some weird voltage issues where arduinos would get fired if I connected them to my PC, so today I tried a different approach. After reading quite a lot on the topic (and boy, was it difficult to gather information...) I carefully desoldered D1 so that I could power my Arduino straight from my computer without experiencing magic smokes or similar.
Since I was full of old RAMPS and fried Arduinos, I did my experiments. Everything seemed to work fine, at least no smoke was rising at any stage. So I connected RAMPS to my working arduino, plugged the 12v in and connected the Arduino through USB to a Mains adapter, just to see if everything worked fine. The printer turned on, no smoke, no fire. Then I connected the USB cable to my PC. And the LCD (I'm mounting a Full Graphic Smart Controller) started flickering on and off, without displaying anything. Also, the USB cable (the same I was using before) started to slowly heat up.
So I don't know what I should do... I'm still not able to talk to my printer. Also, if I try to use the display controller while on mains and tell it to home all axis, nothing will happen, it just freezes.
What could it be? A broken Arduino? Broken RAMPS? Both? Or is it just me completely missing the point here?
Thanks in advance!