Yaxis not working with new step stick

Hello RepRap,

This is my first post so if I break any cardinal rules please be patient. And yes, I'm a noob.
I did a few searches on this (and other forums) but didn't find anything that looked like what I'm experiencing so I thought I'd post my cry for help here. Thanks in advance for any help!

I've been working on my first build, Prusa i3, RAMPS 1.4, Stepper Drivers A4988, ATMEGA 2560.

Managed to get the printer up and running briefly. Was in the process of doing some calibration and the Yaxis stepper motor stopped moving. I had successfully moved X, Y, Z, and E1 previously. The last movement I got from the Yaxis sounded like I'd hit the end of the carriage even though I was at the mid-way point. Loud rattling sound. I thought maybe one of the bearings might have bound up or something. After powering down I was able to move the Yaxis manually and it didn't feel like it was in a mechanical bind.

I figured that maybe something went wrong with the stepper driver module. I moved the Yaxis motor leads over to the Xaxis and the Yaxis motor ran ok. Next I located a spare A4988 driver module and replaced the one on the Yaxis on the RAMPS board. Connected the Yaxis motor leads back on the Yaxis position, and got no movement. Hmmmm...
Thinking that maybe the spare A4988 was bad, I switched it with the Xaxis module and it worked in that position. Hmmm... (again)
So, I'm thinking that it is either the voltage supply or signaling to the Yaxis position on the RAMPS board OR something in the circuitry from the ATMEGA board that feeds the RAMPS board.
I don't know what steps to take to troubleshoot that question to isolate the problem further.

Any suggestions or advice would be most welcome.

Thanks!

You might have a bad RAMPS board where a signal to the driver gets lost. Sometimes the jumpers under the driver don´t provide good electrical contact.
Try to switch x-driverboard to the y-driverport. If that doesn´t work, it is the driverport.

Also, there is a nice article about stepper drivers current/ Vref calibration in the RepRap wiki.
[reprap.org]

Another good read is the calibration guide:
[reprap.org]

Hope it helps
-Olaf

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/17/2015 06:00AM by o_lampe.

Thanks O_lampe!
When I switched out the y-axis A4988 for a known working one I got the same results (no movement of the yaxis). And, if I move the y-axis motor leads to the x-axis port on the RAMPS board, the y-axis stepper runs normally. Thanks for helping me confirm my suspicion. I've got another RAMPS board on order and another ATMEGA 2560 in case the damage is deeper than just the RAMPS board.

I toyed with the idea of trying to switch the y-axis over to the E1 port but the notes I could find on that firmware mod didn't get me very far. Couldn't get a error free compile of Marlin.

I also appreciate the links. As a newbie it is really helpful to get references to more sources of good information from someone who has been at this for awhile.

All The Best!
bchamp4

The new RAMPS 1.4 board arrived today and I anxiously got it installed and rewired. Unfortunately it appears that the Yaxis port on this new RAMPS board is not functioning either. I suspect there may be damage to the Arduino board circuits that supply signals to the Yaxis port. Does anyone have any pointers or troubleshooting advice to share? I was hoping that there might be some diagnostics that could be run from the Arduino IDE or maybe some commands sent via Pronterface to further isolate the issue.

Any suggestions or advice would be welcome.

Thanks,
bchamp

I could be a cold solder on the arduinoboard-headers.
If you don´t find anything, you can still switch the y-driver to the empty E1 port.
You have to edit the pins.h from Marlin to reroute the y-pins to those from the E1 stepper.

-Olaf

I agree that this is probably the best work around for my situation. I found a few posts about how to accomplish switching the yaxis over to the E1 port. It involved editing the stepper.cpp file but specifically indicated that the pins.h should not be changed. Here's the ref to that other forum entry,
[forums.reprap.org].
That thread is from August of 2012 so it may be that something substantial has changed in either the Arduino or Marlin software.

I followed those instructions to the best of my ability and kept getting compile errors. I'm using Arduino v 1.6.2 and Marlin 1.0.2.
Basically the procedure as I understood it from the other forum posts was to open stepper.cpp and look for "WRITE(Y_DIR_PIN, WRITE(Y_STEP_PIN, and WRITE(Y_ENABLE_PIN" ... The instructions (as I read them) indicate that I should leave these sections of code as they are except to add a duplicate of all the WRITE commands substituting "E1" for "Y" such that the above code would come out looking like this,

WRITE(Y_DIR_PIN (whatever other code)) WRITE(E1_DIR_PIN (copy of whatever other code was in the original write))
WRITE(Y_STEP_PIN (whatever other code)) WRITE(E1_STEP_PIN (copy of whatever other code was in the original write))
WRITE(Y_ENABLE_PIN (whatever other code)) WRITE(E1_ENABLE_PIN (copy of whatever other code was in the original write))

As I stated earlier, I tried following this to the best of my ability but once finished, I kept getting compile errors. There were several required edits so it is entirely possible that I missed something or had a typo. But reading the compile errors, it appeared to me that it was more than a typo. There were some lines in the compile errors that referred to "not having declared or defined .h" I'm not a coder by any stretch but it just didn't appear like it was a simple missed semi-colon or something.

I'm going to dig into the Arduino ide programming tutorials and see what I can find that might help implement the required modification.

As before, if anyone has been down this road recently, I'd greatly appreciate any hints, tips, or suggestions.

Thanks!
bchamp4