Sanguinololu board not working for extruder motor

I set all my stepper boards to .4v (I needed a little more for the Z axis).


I even did this on the extruder pins on the sanguinololu board, and all the motors and boards work great except for the extruder stepper. When I could not get the extruder motor to work on Printrun, I moved the board and motor to a different axis and tried it, it worked fine. So the problem is with the board, I checked the underside to see if all my solderings were good, and they looked fine with no bridges or anything. I poked around with my multimeter and could get 5v readings off some of the pins. I don't know how to troubleshoot this any further.

There has been a history of extruders not moving when not in print mode, this might be one of those instances. Try actually printing something.

I did, and the extruder did not work. It is a problem with the board or Sprinter, and I don't know how to fix the firmware because it came pre-loaded. The electronics wiring looks okay.

What firmware are you using? It might be your firmware settings.

Sprinter

I also had those problems with some skeinforce settings in replicatorG. Switching to printrun solved it for me. For replicatorG there is an fix on thingiverse made by a 14 year old i thought.

Try loading either the latest [github.com] (recommended) or the latest Sprinter from Github. The configuration.h is almost identical. Just change the setting for the electronics to 6 for Sanguinololu

#define MOTHERBOARD 6

You'll need to download the Arduino software to upload the firmware to the electronics.

You'll need to learn how to do this sooner or later. Once you verify that all your motors work, you'll need to calibrate the extruder so that it pushes the correct length of filament.

I'm having a similar problem as well. When I try to extrude with repsnapper the motor sounds like it's trying to turn, but nothing happens. I tried putting the motor on a different axis and it works, I also put the A988 on a different axis and that works also. the only thing I can think of is a problem with sprinter or repsnapper. I haven't tried printing with it yet. I'll have to save that for next weekend when I get back home, but it would be nice to be able to run the extruder without printing.

Was your nozzle hot enough to melt and extrude plastic? Did you adjust the trimpot on the Pololu? What speed were you trying to extrude at? Perhaps it was too fast. Try starting with a lower speed like 60 mm/s or less and work up from there.

brnrd,

I don't have a bootloader (yet), so I cannot try reloading the firmware until I get one. My other concern is that all the sanguinololu came in a kit from emaker with Sprinter already loaded. If it was a firmware problem, wouldn't all the other kits have the same issue? Although, I am having other minor software issues with printrun on my mac 10.5.

If the firmware is already loaded, then the bootloader is already installed. All you have to do is get Arduino and download the latest firmware, edit the configuration.h file and the thermistortables.h (if needed to put the table for your thermistor) and upload to the Sanguinololu.

The firmware for the Reprap is a work in progress and it's continually being improved. Anyone who uses a Reprap should really know how to load it. Although it's not as easy as a Makerbot, it's not really that difficult.