I have built a home made 3D printer but I'm having some issues with getting the SD card to initialize or mount. I can print from USB without any problem.

I am using the following;

Arduino Mega 2560
RAMPS 1.4
REPRAP Pro Discount Smart Controller (tried both normal and full graphic variants
Repetier firmware V2 (or what ever the latest version is)
Windows 7, Arduino V1.0.6 to compile, Repetier Host

I have the SDDetect set to -1 and with that when I go through the menu on the screen I have an option to mount an SD card but it just resets and nothing happens. If I change the SDDetect to 49 when the SD is plugged in all the printer does is continuously restarts.

I am using a 128mb Fat16 SD card.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

I haven't seen a 128MB card in a long time, so I guess it's pretty old. Maybe try a new one?

Without a SD inside Pronterface should say at the end of the initialisation "SD init failed".
Not sure what Repetier give as status info though but without this error message it means you SD is not activated properly somewhere in the firmware.
With the smart controller you only need to uncomment the define for it but AFAIK there is no need for a change in the SDDetect.
One thing though:
The tiny SD only support FAT as the filesystems.
If in FAT32 it might not work and even if it is FAT there is chance that this is not supported by the SD controller itself.
So if in doubt try a cheap SD of 2GB or bigger size.
Might seem wasteful but think about upgrading to a WiFi enabled SD - this way you can leave the SD in the printer and won't wear down the slots by the ongoing swapping.

The old SD card might be too power consuming and overloads the 3.3V regulator on the smart adapter. Or even worse, overloads the 5V regulator on the AtMega which causes the continuous resets.

An SD card pulling several amps seems like a nightmare scenario, but maybe i'm just spoiled with new technology.

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Master Tinkerer

Hi guys sorry for the late reply, I have tried formatting the card, I have a variety of cards from 128mb - 8gb using NTFS, Fat16 and Fat32.

They give me the same results I mentioned above.

Anything other thoughts?

Quote
Downunder35m
Might seem wasteful but think about upgrading to a WiFi enabled SD - this way you can leave the SD in the printer and won't wear down the slots by the ongoing swapping.

That is an idea, that I will defiantly look into, thanks. But either way I have a to get a standard SD card working first don't I?

You've tried two different LCDs that have SD card readers, and they both don't work? Suggests a bad cable (do you have spares to swap in?), or a bad connection on the ramps board. Possibly it could be a problem with one of the pins that connects to the SD card interface on the mega2560. It's going to be difficult to tell without having spares of each part to swap in, but you could try tracing the connections and seeing if you can spot a dry joint or a solder bridge.

There isn't any special config needed to get the SD card support working on either Marlin or Repetier, mine worked without any fuss with both.