Its please help a newbie day again

I bought the Makergear mendel prusa kit. The one that is completely unassembled all the way down to the RAMPS boards. I have the kit put together mechanically and have the electronics put together. I downloaded the Arduino Mega driver and updated the driver. It loaded the driver fine. When i connect the RAMP board to my PC the green LED flashes twice then some red LED's on the mega board light up. But when i open the reprap console i cant get the machine to do anything. What am i missing? I dont have the computer power supply connected to the ramp board yet but i assume using only the usb plug will supply power to everything wont it? The computer power supply is just an option to use i thought.

I have spent at least 15 hours thus far just getting to this point. The complete lack of acurate instructions and inadequit instructions from makergear is ridiculous. Even the instructions they provide as a suplement to the prusa instructions leave out many things and leaves the builder with trying to just figure it out on your own. And once you get to the electronics side of things holy cow lookout. Im sure this is all simple for a second build but for a newcomer the lack of instruction is a major herdle. The reason i bought a completely unassembled kit was to learn as much as possible from the ground up. I guess i got what i asked for.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/21/2012 09:56PM by GITRDUN.

Hi Gitrdun,

FYI, the USB power only drives the Arduino. The RAMPS board has to have more current than USB can provide, especially for the min. 5A the hot end needs not to mention a heated bed if you have one. It needs about 11A. . For the RAMPs. the instructions on RepRap weren't the most precise (and I need to make some submissions one day) but I did get a working board out of them.

[reprap.org]

Re-review [reprap.org] I went ahead and bought a PS on eBay for about $12. [cgi.ebay.com] and its been working great. I got a bit ahead of myself though and now I need to disassemble the Z axis to realign everything.

Good luck. And check out the IRC. It's great! (http://reprap.org/wiki/IRC)

-david