How did I burn out my motor driver boards?

Hi Guys,

I have been building my 3D printer very slowly over the last couple weeks, and I ran into a problem with some of my motors were not running at all, and some just vibrate when I would send them a command.

After some trouble shooting, I think the problem is I somehow burnt out 4 of my 5 driver boards.

I was really confused, but I after I noticed that only my extruder motor was working, I moved the extruder driver around to all the other axis, and they all moved perfect with that driver.

I tried to play around with the potentiometer, but on the broken boards it has no affect on the Vref.

Now, when I originally wired up my motors, I did put them in backwards, but that wouldn't burn out the driver board, would it? I would think that would just cause them to run backwards.

The kit I bought came with "Stepstick stepper motor driver boards. These 2 layer boards use an A4988 stepper motor driver and are clones of the popular Pololu driver boards." but I am going to replace them with the real A4988 Pololu boards [www.pololu.com]

I really hope it doesn't happen again, any advice?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/19/2016 04:33PM by Truant19.

... could it be, you plugged the motor cables on/off while under power? - this will most likely kill the drivers ...

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Viktor
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I don't think so, since the RAMPS shield came with the drivers already installed.

... not the drivers - if you unplug or insert the motor cables for testing or exchanging the motors, while under power, the drivers will blow.

On the other hand, if you give them too much current, the will blow too ... the "thermal protection" won't last for long, if highly overdriven.

"Vibrating" motors are a sign for either too high speed or too low power - so rising the power won't move them, if they stall for wrong set speed and acceleration parameters ...

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Viktor
--------
Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

Are there 3 jumpers under each driver on the RAMPs?

Yes there is.

Quote
VDX
... not the drivers - if you unplug or insert the motor cables for testing or exchanging the motors, while under power, the drivers will blow.

On the other hand, if you give them too much current, the will blow too ... the "thermal protection" won't last for long, if highly overdriven.

"Vibrating" motors are a sign for either too high speed or too low power - so rising the power won't move them, if they stall for wrong set speed and acceleration parameters ...

I don't think I plugged them in or out while it was powered, but maybe.

I don't think its anything wrong with the firmware parameters since there is one driver that does work just fine for all the axis motors.

On the burnt out drivers, adjusting the potentionmeter has no affect on the Vref/motor current, so I am out of luck there.

I've had batches of stepper drivers that just plain don't work. After replacing with different, slightly less cheap steppers, everything sprang into life and worked as I expected.

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Those little driver boards are a poor design. You should consider yourself very lucky or an extremely careful person if you manage to install a controller board and have them all working at first attempt. Buy a bunch of spares, because you're probably going to need them.

Problems with those driver boards include poor thermal design- the board is too small to remove heat from the chips, so you can't use the chips at their rated maximum current. The tiny pots are extremely easy to break, there's no end stop so you never can be sure where it is when rotating it (it can jump from minimum to maximum current with just a tiny rotation), you have to connect a meter when adjusting the pot in order to set the current to a known value, when you adjust the pot it is very easy to short other connections and destroy the board.

When and if the day comes that you tire of messing with those modules, look into a 32 bit controller board that doesn't use modular drivers. Smoothie and Duet are both good...

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]