Microstepping seems to be locked on

Okay so i wanted to switch to 1/4 stepping having installed a flex3drive on my smartrapcore alu. But when I removed the ms1 and ms3 jumper and ran it, it's still running 1/16 microstepping as my steps per mm did not halve the amount of extrusion. So I removed all the jumpers for full steps and its still on 1/16. The motors sound the same and I'm needing to use 4500 steps per mm for the flex3drive (which is geared 40:1). This is too high really I'm worried it will tax the board too much.

I am running marlin 1.1.0 rc 3 and genuine mega 2560 with ramps 1.4 and a4988 steppers. Everything working normally before except my arduino doesn't run off the ramps as I think either the d1 diode isn't right or I blew the voltage regulator, but I don't see how this affects the stepping,and with my mk8 before everything ran normally.

Do I have to do something else to change stepping? I feel like I've missed something blindingly obvious.

Maybe your board has the jumpers shorted on the PCB, see here.

You have been caught by a dodgy ramps supplier

Some cheap and nasty ramps out there have tracks under the jumpers, so its always at 1/16 micro stepping

Cool thanks guys that makes sense. Seems it can be fixed with a knife, I've got a spare ramps board knocking about. Might put a multimeter across those jumpers, they shouldn't have a resistance of 0!

Yep - the jumper pins have a resistance of (just above) zero! So thanks for the advice and now to let some people know the ramps boards they're supplying are not up to spec.

If you could list the suppler, it might save someone else having this issue

Well I don't want to give them a bad rep because in every other regard they have been excellent, but it was Smartfriendz, who supplied this board with their Smartrapcore Alu kit I recently put together. I can only assume they've been duped too, as they supply a genuine Arduino (I've never actually seen a genuine one before now), but then a poor quality ramps baord - it also has some voltage issue it wont run off 12v without usb power for the arduino. Another forum member has had the same issue with voltage on his Smartrapcore alu too. I don't suppose he's tried to change the stepping.

Having these bad traces/design flaws is an odd thing to do (as a cost saving measure) as the stepper 3x2 headers are all soldered and populated with fancy multicoloured jumpers which must cost them money. I can only presume its a genuine error at every level.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/07/2016 05:52AM by DjDemonD.

The closest looking board to the one I have is this one sintron ramps board as it has the multicoloured jumpers. BUT - I am NOT saying all of these are bad - they just look to be the same as the one I've got.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/07/2016 07:26AM by DjDemonD.