fried ramps?

I was adjusting the current screw on my stepper drivers. The ramps is on the side of the printer and its uncomfortable to work on it like that since I have to position my body uncomfortably. I could have moved the printer but I didnt feel like it, well i wish i did feel like it. I destroyed the screw accidentally so i put in a replacement stepper driver and i was tired and it was dark so i put it in the wrong pin i didnt notice until i turned it on and the buzzr on my lcd made a weird noise so i turned it off. I'm pretty sure the ramps is destroyed because none of the motors will move, the lcd still works I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure I didnt break the motors thankfully but idk. Well there's the story of my 2 dumb mistakes one after another. Time to clean up my mess. I dont have a lot of money so i found a replacement ramps board on ebay for around $60. Sounds too good to be true. Is this board functional or worth even buying? [www.ebay.com]

It unlikely you have damaged the ramps as has very little on it that can break. More likely you damaged the arduino it is plugged into.

2nded More likely you have destroyed the mega. Unplug the ramps from the mega ( while everything is off) and just try to connect to the mega with your host software'

Depending on which pin you did plug it into, you could have put 12v on the 5v rail... worst case this could also have killed all pololus

You could also power the board and check the temperature of the Mega chip with power applied. More often than not, when their blown, they get REALLY hot and just don't work. I fried an atmega 644 on some gen 3 electronics by accidentally putting 12V to the step/direction pin header. The chip got screaming hot and wouldn't work.

I agree that you are much more likely to have fried your Atmega board. I saw an Arduino Mega 2560 from that same ebay vendor for $16.00. I actually have several items on order through that vendor but they're smooth rails and belts and what not, no electronics. I can't imagine that the electronics this guy sources could be made much (if any) worse than the other chinese sourced ramps/mega's that are abundant amongst the various 3D printer vendors.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2014 09:17AM by umdpru.

I got the new electronic board. It looks really clean and good. So far, it's working just like my old official one I had. For $62 which includes the arduino, ramps, 4 stepper drivers, heatsinks. I think this is the cheapest ramps solution. I test printed an octopus at 999%, the fastest possible and it came out decent too.

Lesson learned: Dont work on printer when you are extremely tired.