parts of ramps not working, y motor works

I am having alot of trouble getting these RAMPS to work. I have bought 4 so far and 4 out of 4 have been broken on arrival. What keeps happening is that I can get one or two motors to work but the third motor will not work. One board I couldn't get the extruder heater to work.

I am using marlin firmware and RAMPS 1.4. I attached my marlin configuration file. Here is the testing I have done so far. Take for example the most recent arduino board and ramps shield I bought.

I tested the pins on the arduino and they all seem to work with an LED. Here are all the pins I am checking for on the arduino. All step pins are dim when I send move command which is because it is pulsing. All dir pins are low movingin positive direction and high in negative direction. All the enables are always low, but I think that is correct for Marlin firmware right?

When I send gcode the y motor is working, the z motor is not moving but has holding torque, and the x and e0 motors are not moving and have no holding torque; the heater and thermistors are working fine.

I tried swapping the drivers between y and z but this did not change anything so I believe the stepper drivers are ok. I adjusted all the trimpots to vref = 0.4V. On my meter I am reading 12V to each stepper driver.

I tested all the motors by connecting each cable to the y output on ramps. All the motors work when in the y position.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/25/2013 11:24AM by mkaisercross.

Been having a similar Problem. With me only the extrudor stepper was working. Occasionally the X-axis would move in one direction.
At some point it came to me that there might be a problem in the communication between the Arduino and the RAMPS. So I checked if all the pins of the RAMPS would be properly connected to the Arduino while being seated on another. Turned out the pins a the side were slightly to short to get into contact with the Arduino, because the single line socets need the pins to be stuck deeper than the double line. Also the doulbe line prevented me from setting the RAMPS on the Arduino properly. Tried to shorten the pins on the doulbe line but now they wont connect... more work to come!

I will try to post a picture later and maybe even a solution.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/25/2013 09:16AM by mole_man.

Ok, I solved my problem. Was very simple.
In my case the RAMPS board was still not sitting tightly on the Arduino. For some reason there was a blocking in one of the lines of the two line socket on my Arduino. A little more force than I would usually apply in this context and voila!
Only took me three days, fried two stepper drivers and broke my meter in the process.

YES! I have the RAMPS connected to the arduino with some hookup cables right now and it works perfect. I never wouldve guessed that because it looked like my shield was on pretty good, but I guess it is sensitive. Ya it's been a rough start for me too