extruder stepper grinding

[jimc]

ok i am having an interesting issue and i think my rambo $hit the bed. i woke up this morning to find the printer airprinted 1/2 the night. thought the extruder just got clogged or something but after removing the filament and jogging the extruder motor it has this god awful grinding noise, i figured it was my gearbox pinion stripped out since these wear over time. after taking it apart i found the gearbox was fine and i could turn the geared stepper no problem by hand and everything was smooth. i have another extruder stepper here in my drawer so i plugged that in and the same thing. jog the extruder either direction and the stepper shaft jumps around and moves both directions erratically making a ton of noise. what i was going to do is move the extruder over from tool 0 to tool 1 output on the rambo. i moved the thermistor and motor wires over and made the switch to tool 1 in s3d control panel. the temp still reads 0 and it gives me a feedback saying inactive extruder. i would think there is something in the firmware that needs to be changed to point the output from e0 to e1 on the rambo but looking in the config h file i cant seem to find it. maybe i am missing it somewhere. does anyone know if you need to make firmware mods and where the setting is?

[jsc]

Since you don't actually have a dual extruder, I would just reconfigure the firmware to treat E1 as E0 and leave everything else the same.

In pins.h, search down for "#if MOTHERBOARD == 301". Take all the settings for "#define E1_WHATEVER XX" and move the values to all the "#define E0_WHATEVER XX" lines.

[jimc]

thats what i was looking for jin however i swapped those values and when i verify or try to upload it gives me an error that something is not right with it.

[jsc]

What error do you get, exactly?

[jimc]

ok first pic is after i swapped the values. the e1 values i made eo and the e0 i made e1. second pic is the error i got when i compiled.

Screen Shot 2014-10-30 at 10.11.01 PM.png (56.57 KiB) Viewed 10484 times

Screen Shot 2014-10-30 at 10.11.31 PM.png (85.71 KiB) Viewed 10484 times

[jimc]

josh helped me out a bit this morning with this and as i was messing with swapping motors to do some test i found the issue. the green wire inside the motor plug on the cable was arcing. the wire ended up coming out of the socket in the connector. there is quite a bit of current running though that wire. more than i would expect. the whole connector was flashing blue. well i certainly feel better its not the controller board. thanks as always to the great support at makergear!

[insta]

I'm amazed that didnt' take out the driver.

[jsc]

Glad you got it sorted out. Regarding the firmware error, not that it's helpful at this point, I didn't realize the stock firmware had -1 as the pin numbers for the E1 pins, I must have been looking at my dual extruder firmware. -1 means undefined in this context. Sorry about that.

[jimc]

Jin, thats ok. Josh had mentioned that he doesnt think the firmware likes to have e1 as active while e0 is inactive. He said he has never really tried it though.

I do hope the driver on the board is ok. I think it is. I was pushing on the wire to keep a good connection and it was working ok. I then disconnected it right away. I have a new cable going out today

[jsc]

Okay. My suggestion was not to configure it so that E1 was active while E0 was undefined, rather to configure E0 to use the pins for the second extruder headers, effectively swapping them. Just in case you or someone else needs this in the future, the correct numbers are:

#define E1_STEP_PIN 33
#define E1_DIR_PIN 42
#define E1_ENABLE_PIN 25
#define E1_MS1_PIN 63
#define E1_MS2_PIN 64

Just swap those in for the E0 pins.