Recommendations for Printer Electronics?

[Aero]

Just upgraded my Prusa i2 to an Prusa i3 Samuel, and unfortunately in the process "released the smoke" from my current RAMPS board.

Rather than blindly buy a new one from Reprap Discount, do you guys have recommendations on whether I should switch to something else?

What I am leery about is getting one of the "knock off" parts which seems to happen quite a bit (for example using a low cost mosfet to drive the heater bed).

I hear good things about the "Duet" controller, but I don't know if that is the way I want to go. Anyone have any recommendations?

Note: Considering I can get a "kit" to buy a full i3 for about $300, I am not 100% sure I want to spend big bucks on this.

-Alex

[Alex]

Do you know where the smoke was released from?  Do any of the steppers work? Maybe a matter of replacing the stepper driver.

Or move one of the axis to any free axis, like extruder 2.

[Aero]

Not 100% sure, but I don't think it is the stepper motors.

The core symptom is that with the RAMPS board mounted to my Mega it fails to communicate. If I remove the RAMPS board, I am able to get Marlin to come up.

I tried removing all the steppers from the RAMPS board (I suspected a burned out/shorted stepper driver as well) and re mounting the board with only that connected. Still no connection via RAMPS.

Most likely, I am thinking it is a blown diode, or perhaps one of the mosfets, but honestly I don't want to try to keep soldering/unsoldering any further at this point.

The key thing I keep running into is the power draw for the Heated Bed causes the mosfet for it to get extremely hot. I probably should have tried running at 24V to see if would help things, but at this point I either want to: 1. Get a replacement RAMPS 1.4 board (I see on RepRap Discount it would be ~$60 with shipping). or

2. Get some other board (like the Duo @~$150).

-Alex

[wolfmanjm]

I would recommend either a smoothieboard or an Azteeg X5 mini. Both are excellent with the best firmware available.

[Ken Snyder]

If you just want an inexpensive replacement for your RAMPS board, here's one for $4:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-shipping-RAMPS-1-4-3D-printer-control-panel-printer-Control-Reprap-MendelPrusa/1709208309.html

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[wolfmanjm]

I wouldn't try running that at 24v :)

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[Ken Snyder]

There's instruction on the web for modifying them for 24v if that's what you want to do.

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[Bill Seiler]

Does it have +5v when the ramps board is connected?

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