Motors move back and forth when printer is powered

Hi,

Yesterday I was powering the motors of my Mendel Prusa for the first time, with the following result:

All axes are moving back and forth (by half a centimetre or so) in an uncontrollable way.
This happens also when the Sanguinololu 1.3a is not connected to the PC. The motion rests for a while when I press the "reset" button on the board but then starts again.

When I try to connect to the Sanguino board via printerface it does not seem to work. Instead it starts continuously returning some apparently pointless numbers. Returning those numbers is presumably correlated with the axes motion, because also this behaviour stops for a while when the reset button on the Sanguino board is pressed.
When the board then starts again to deliver the numbers, also the motion starts.

I am quite new to the 3D printing business and unfortunately not very knowledgeable when it comes to software.
I would greatly appreciate any kind of help!

The Sanguino board is preloaded with firmware, I already bought it in this state.
Maybe uploading the firmware again will help?

Thanx a lot!

that sounds like some sort of test firmware to make sure the motors work and everything is wired correctly. I would suggest trying to upload the firmware.

I just had the same issue. upgraded firmware and it seems to have resolved the issue.

Dave

Many thanks.
I am just struggling to update the firmware. I am trying for days now to compile Sprinter under Windows using Cygwin.
Executing "make" however doesn't work flawlessly. :-(

Cygwin? Use the arduinio IDE, that's what its for.

I followed the "Complete beginners guide" at: [github.com]
According to this guide, one is supposed to first execute "make" (outside Arduino IDE it seems, which is why I installed Cygwin) and subsequently to compile another time using the Arduino software.
Please let me know if you think this is not the right way of doing it.
My system runs on Windows XP by the way.

I'm not sure what's going on there, but it won't be using cygwin make. I think that, on Windows, you don't need to do anything from the command line, just load sprinter.pde into the ide and hit 'compile'.

I used windows, Arduino IDE 023 and modified the configuration.h file based on my settings. I also had a problem with some left over HTML code in one of the include files but can't recall which one as I am at work right now, that said the name will appear in the message window at the bottom of the IDE when you compile and it was the last line of that file that needed to be deleted. Guess I should specify I installed Marlin and it was on a RAMPS and not a Sanguino, but it was firmware related as was mentioned, likely some test code or something.

For those who are facing similar problems, here is finally my solution: I used Marlin instead of Sprinter. This worked without problems.