Ramps screen turns off

I have a ramps 1.4 board that I was using last night and it stopped working. I'm not sure whats going on and hoping someone could help me trouble shoot this.

Here's what I'm using:
ATX Corsair 430w power supply. Its rated over 30A on the 12V rail acording to Corsair.
Ramps 1.4 with drivers
RepRapDiscount Smart Controller
Marlin setup for someone else's I3X
Ardunio Mega(1)
Arduino Mega(2) - just another Arduino I had lying around

I turn the power supply on and the screen comes on and then fades away. It has some back light, but thats it.

I swapped out the Arduino Mega(2) with another one and it does the same thing, however when I tried to connect Arduino Mega(1) to my computer to reload Marlin, it would not connect.

The rest of the trouble shooting I tried using both boards and they both acted the same.

I removed the drivers from the ramp board and it comes on and appears to work. I cant control any of the motors though (I wasn't able to before though either. I've tried this testing with the motors plugged in and unplugged)

The screen comes on with 2 drivers plugged in, but either restarts or goes to a screen with 2 of the 4 rows with every pixel on.

I've swapped all the drivers around and have the same problems no matter what I do.

I've also tried adjusting the trimpots, and currently have them on the lowest setting.

With only one driver in it will stay on longer before restarting. With 4 it happens almost instantly.



I have no idea whats going on. I'm afraid that these heat sinks are rather large and when they get warm the glue softens on the tape and they might have touched some of the pins behind/next to it. If this happened could it have caused this to happen? It almost is acting as it doesn't have enough power when it fades out, but I'm pretty sure my power supply has enough juice because it worked well for about 20 minutes before this happened.

What can go bad on a Ramps board that I should be testing?

Thanks!
(This post was quickly while attempting to watch 2 children. I apologize for its hastiness!)

I went one by one with the drivers. I've found 1 that it never works with, and there's one that is iffy.

I'm leaning towards replacing 2 of the steppers, possibly just ordering another ramps set just to have on hand since from the looks of it, they can be fragile.

Update - I'm sure the drivers are all shot, dunno what happened, but I think the tape on one of the heat sinks loosened up and it slipped and hit the pins. These heat sinks only have a fraction of an inch of gap between them and the pins. Next time around I'll use some more tape on the heat sinks in case they slip, so they wont short out the pins.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/02/2014 08:39PM by cfy7.