Ramps fried after try DRV8825

Hi guys!

I tried DRV8825 stepper drivers today on my ramps 1.4, it wouldnt turn the motor, then I went back to my A4988 drivers to test, and now they wont turn the motors. they move a little but act like they are not getting enough voltage. I also noticed that my extruder will not heat up now, but the heated bed will, I was wondering if the DRV8825 might've fried my ramps mosfet or something? Does that sound reasonable? I am trying to figure deduce what is wrong, but I am stuck. I made sure to check the pins on the DRV8825 and they seem to match with the board, but its hard to see underneath the headers on the board..

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/21/2017 10:50PM by Nate523.

I can confirm that something is wrong with the voltage because the led that comes on when the extruder heater is on, comes on, but like very dim, is that the same power that drives the stepper motors?

Allright, the ramps board is not fried, turns out it was a diode that was messing up things, got a beefier one and everything seems to be in order except I can't get these DRV8825 drivers to work, I get whining noises but no movement on the stepper motors.

well, jeez, I guess I fried one of hte drivers, because all the rest work when I finally decided to try them out. Whole mighty though they whine like a banshee!

Yes these things are a bit noisy for my taste, I am using only 12V though, I wonder if anyone has experience with these guys at 24V if they are less noisy, because I can't get rid of that high pitched whine.

You won't be able to use the RAMPS board at 24V without some reworking and component replacements.

Yes, I have looked up the mods to use ramps 1.4 with 24V, the only thing I am worried about is will it make a difference with the DRV8825s? I will probably still stick with the standard stepper motors just because with higher voltage maybe I can reduce their noise a bit.

Do you mean the drivers or the motors are noisy? I have a delta-style printer, and unlike Cartesian printers, in a delta the hot end is essentially hanging from the motors. For this reason, delta printers use a "holding current", which means that even when the motors are not moving they are on, at about 60% max current I think, so that they have enough holding torque to prevent the hot end from falling. Due to this, my motors are noisy even when sitting still. But, I don't hear anything from the stepper drivers using a 12V power supply.

You are right, I mean the motors, see at lower currents the motors aren't as noisy, but then I didn't have enough juice to get the stepper motors to work with my delta printer, so I am wondering if I switch from 12V to 24V if that will help with that or not.

Well,

Just as an update, I ended up rewiring my 3D printer for 24V, for my DC fans and other 12V items I got a DC to DC step down converter from 24 to 12 V, for my heater catridge which was 12V I just made sure all my max pid values were like 70 or so, is where it seemed to be the most common sense, at full 24V holy cow it jumped fast to 300 C!! RAMPS 1.4, replaced the 16V poly fuse with auto fuse, removed the diode that allows power to go to the arduino and am just powering the Mega 2560 via the USB port.

I guess stepper motors are supposed to be run by PSU's with more voltage supply then they are rated because they are more dependent on the current, something said that? They run a lot better now with the 24V power supply.

Long story short, there is still a faint whine from the DRV8825 stepper motors, but not too bad, otherwise with 24V power supply they work fantastic. The only problem I have is that when I try to do something big and complicated, it does the randomly stopping for few hundred milliseconds or so, which leaves blobs, probqably because I have to tweak the lines per segment value to get that to be smoother, it is a limitation of 8-bit arduino I would think. As far as quality, I have yet to decide if the DRV8825 really gave me a quality boost, it seems a lot more accurate and repeatable, which is good, but as far as quality I don't think I am seeing much difference.