Smoke re-installation kits?

I just smoked my (techzone) extruder board.

Odd thing is I was commissioning it a few hours ago. (heater worked, hit target temps well according to thermal cam) Stepper/feeder worked.

Then just running a 'dry run' (with no heater or stepper/feeder connected) The board released its smoke. I was a bit surprised being there was no load on it. Though I guess there could be feedback, haven't looked much at the schemas.

(Being that Techzone doesn't have the .sch .brd files, I'm just going by the 'standard' and seems IC2 was lost.)

If it was something on the coms side of things that burned up, it may be possible that your motherboard has been damaged too.

Can you post a picture that shows what circuit smoked? If it was just a voltage regulator or capacitor there is a chance you could replace it and get it working again. If the arduino or sanguino chips have been damaged, then it will be easier to just get a new board.

Was there something that you noticed quit working or did you just see the smoke and immediately power down the system?

It was the motor driver chip (well one of that is noticeable)
on the extruder board.

The smoke was the tell-tale since there were no motors or heater/TC hooked up at that point.


A new board doesn't bother me so much, its more that when it had a load it was fine, with no load it fried. Don't want to pop in a new board to find the same result.

Also doubt any of these would pass UL/CE/CSA with not fuse protection

Load/no load shouldn't matter. Even If there was a solder bridge between two pins or something like that, I would expect that the voltage would have just followed the path of least resistance and fried the chip anyhow rather than flowing through the motor or heater.

I can only guess that one of three things happened. 1) Something came loose and either the board touched metal or something metal fell on the board and created a short circuit. 2) During your first test, everything was plugged in correctly but at some point maybe you unplugged stuff and reconnected it wrong. 3) You unplugged the stepper motor while the coils were energized. (a common mistake that may damage the stepper driver outputs with no visible trace, however if the leads short circuit as you do this it might release smoke)

I would not expect the same thing to happen again as long as you avoid the above issues. If you truly think something was wrong with the board and this was not a matter of operator error, then you should contact Techzone and ask for a replacement.

Thanks Dazed.

Looks like #2. Didn't think I changed/unplugged that connection. (not to mention the PCB-pinouts are not documented well if at all)