Replacement stepper motor driver module

[Dave Winwood]

Hi - my A10 printer is just a week old and has made some great prints with very little issues but today there was smoke from the electronics housing and on inspection I found a burnt stepper driver board. Not sure how common this is and if it indicates a fault with a stepper motor or wiring but I would like to find a UK source so that I can purchase some of these modules - one as a replacement and some spares. Does anyone know of a UK source for these as I don't want to have to wait for shipping from China. Thanks.

[_kaktus_]

Hi


What happened to you certainly does not fill you with joy.
Can you tell which motor was controlled by the damaged module

[Dave Winwood]

Hi, I have spent some time today looking at the issue and I have found that it is the X channel that is not working. I swapped around the stepper driver modules and Y and Z work normally but X now does nothing at all even with a known good stepper module. I also have a problem with the extruder and this motor just jerks back and forth and does not rotate. I had this when first assembling the machine and I found that the yellow wire on the main board side of the interconnect had not latched properly in the connector housing and was not making contact with the black wire on the other connector. I pushed home the yellow wire until was latched correctly and the extruder then worked correctly. I have also just noted that the LCD is lit up but has no data on it. I checked to make sure the ribbon cable was not loose and this was OK but nothing on the LCD. I did all my testing by using the Manual Control features on Repetier Host which works OK. The main electronics module does now seem to have a problem and it's not just a stepper motor driver issue as I first thought. I'm happy to do any further diagnostics to help pin point the problem.

Kind regards,

Dave Winwood

[_kaktus_]

Hi


In my opinion, a failure of the stepstick modules also caused a failure of the controller.
Probably the main µC was damaged.

I have already drawn the attention of the Geeetech crew to a similar type of failure, and asked them to modify the hardware.

There is nothing left for you but to ask your salesperson to replace damaged components.

I believe that this fault was caused by incorrect setting of the stepper motor current. And to make everything clear, I don't blame you for that.
But I expect more of this type of failure.

[Dave Winwood]

OK thanks - I'll contact Amazon UK and see where that leads

[Dave Winwood]

Good news - I had new parts sent to me by Geeetech Europe (I think) - anyway a new board and 4 spare stepper drivers arrived. My old board was certainly toast even though it partially worked so I swapped out the main board. It was quite an easy job. The first thing I noticed was how quiet the printer was with the updated board. The board had 1.1.8 loaded. I did have issues with the home position being off the bed - it took me a while to understand how to change this and I'm still not sure if I did it right. I upgraded to 1.1.9 and have used the 9 point levelling system which seems to work well.

There's lots more to discover now I have a working system. I am having a few issues but by searching this forum I'm finding answers and will gradually fine tune my machine.

Thanks to Kaktus for your help!

[_kaktus_]