New Creality Ender 3, extruder stepper just wobbles?

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hydrogen18
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New Creality Ender 3, extruder stepper just wobbles?

Post by hydrogen18 »

I bought a brand new Creality Ender 3 and assembled it today. I did some basic tests and go the bed level. After doing that, I tried to get the filament feeding. I did the PLA preheat, then tried to use the manual control to run the extruder. It didn't move the filament. I removed the filament, and then tried to run the manual control again. The extruder stepper just wobbles.

I tested the extruder stepper and both set of coils are continuous according to my multimeter.

So if I understand correctly, this means the stepper motor controller must be bad? As only one coil is getting power if the motor just wobbles?
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LePaul
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Re: New Creality Ender 3, extruder stepper just wobbles?

Post by LePaul »

I've asked @thisiskeithb since he has one, perhaps he can chime in

I would be really curious what you meter shows for voltage on that stepper driver itself.
hydrogen18
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Re: New Creality Ender 3, extruder stepper just wobbles?

Post by hydrogen18 »

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I ended up not troubleshooting the Creality main board. I have a o-scope, etc. but the board appears to not be serviceable. I can't solder SMD for example.

I bought a MKS Gen L 1.0 board with some A4498 drivers and put Marlin on the board. It took a while to get the axes working correctly. But currently I have Cura printing a bench boat via USB at it seems to be working fine now. So I'm concluding the original board from Creality is DOA.
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LePaul
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Re: New Creality Ender 3, extruder stepper just wobbles?

Post by LePaul »

That's a terrible experience to go thru....sucks
hydrogen18
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Re: New Creality Ender 3, extruder stepper just wobbles?

Post by hydrogen18 »

I was able to reproduce it with the MKS Gen L!. So I did some investigation and discovered that putting pressure on the female connector for the extruder "axis" where it connects to the board can cause the extrude stepper not to work or if delicately pressed, it works fine.

The original pins look OK, so I went and found another connector on a junk wiring harness that has the same pins (but many more connections). So I removed those pins from the salvage connector. I clipped the original cable from Creality off the harness. Then I soldered these salvaged pins & wires on the harness. I then removed the original pins and installed my salvaged ones into the Creality provided connector. It works now!

So my conclusion is the pins are bad. I think this is the first time I've ever had defective pins in something.
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Roberts_Clif
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Re: New Creality Ender 3, extruder stepper just wobbles?

Post by Roberts_Clif »

hydrogen18 wrote: July 2nd, 2019, 9:06 pm I was able to reproduce it with the MKS Gen L!. So I did some investigation and discovered that putting pressure on the female connector for the extruder "axis" where it connects to the board can cause the extrude stepper not to work or if delicately pressed, it works fine.

The original pins look OK, so I went and found another connector on a junk wiring harness that has the same pins (but many more connections). So I removed those pins from the salvage connector. I clipped the original cable from Creality off the harness. Then I soldered these salvaged pins & wires on the harness. I then removed the original pins and installed my salvaged ones into the Creality provided connector. It works now!

So my conclusion is the pins are bad. I think this is the first time I've ever had defective pins in something.
Good Show!

Most likely the connector pin was incorrectly crimped on the insulation causing a intermittent connection.
This is a very common problem in today's electronics, where Quality control is becoming almost obsolete.

I had a defective trace which was easy to troubleshoot, but harder to find the actual defective trace.
It required looking at the trace under a magnifying glass until seeing a tiny wave in the silk screen then erasing the silkscreen material revealing the broken trace.

Image2.jpg
Image2.jpg (16.57 KiB) Viewed 6653 times
hydrogen18
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Re: New Creality Ender 3, extruder stepper just wobbles?

Post by hydrogen18 »

The last time I had a faulty trace I just added "bodge wires" to all the traces to bypass them. I probably got lucky, it was a two layer board and a bright light showed a bad spot in it.

I think at least on this product, the customer is the quality control. So I finished another 8 hr print with acceptable results. But I'm considering all the cabling for the steppers to be suspect at this point. All prints have one little spot that is inexplicably missing a spot, so I am wondering if the extruder is pausing for 100ms or something due to a bad connection.

Does anyone have a reputable source for better quality cables for the steppers? I don't know anything about what these connectors are called, or what pins need to go to what ends. I have some that came with a CNC Mill, but they appear to be a different pin wiring.
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