Hi all,

Got a really strange problem, I connected the extruder stepper to the E0 connector on the RAMPS 1.4 board and using the LCD did a move axis on the extruder.

The X motor moves really slowly but the extruder stepper stays still. If I move the X, Y or Z axes or auto home everything behaves exactly as they should.

I tried another RAMPS board which did the same. Sadly I later fried the spare in an unrelated power mis-plugging incident!

I have commented out PREVENT_DANGEROUS_EXTRUSION for now for testing purposes and have the motherboard set to 33 (BOARD_RAMPS_13_EF.

I have looked through my configuration.h and cannot see anything wrong.

Any thoughts anyone, this is the last hurdle before I start calibrating and, hopefully, printing.

All help is greatly appreciated.

Z

The X-axis moves when you are trying to extrude?

Is the hotend heated when testing the extruder? I think Marlin has code to prevent any extrusion until the hotend hits 150-170 range. I normally just change it to 5 in the Configuration.h file when I am testing settings.

Kurzaa - I had commented out the line PREVENT_DANGEROUS_EXTRUSION which meant Marlin was happy to extrude at any temperature.

UPDATE.
If I did an auto home before trying to extrude then the x carriage stayed still and the extruder motor ticked and the driver got very hot.

I bought four steppers from the same source at the same time all of which came with detachable cables the three on the axes all worked fine, although I had to connect the X axis one up the opposite way round (at the RAMPS end) to the Y & Z axes in order for all three axes to go in the same direction. The motors arrived with the four cables disconnected and I just connected them and off they went.

The three axis cables are Black, Green, Red, Blue (at the RAMPS end), but in this configuration the extruder motor just ticks as described. So I got the Fluke out and rang the connections on the motor cable out. The extruder motor however is wired differently! I changed the
connector at the RAMPS end to Red, Green, Black Blue and it works! Looking back I should have rung the motor out sooner but I assumed that the four motors would be the same.

Live and learn. Anyhow extruded about 20mm of filament, must speed it up a bit though, took ages!

Thanks all and hopefully this might be of use to others. Looks like I won't be needing the replacement stepper being delivered tomorrow now.

Cheers

Z

In that case I misunderstood what that feature did. Thanks for pointing it out and Grats on your progress.