16 February 2012

Surprise

I received a surprise parcel on Saturday from Mr Sum, just one day after he sent it. The postal service obviously doesn't loose all of his parcels it seems, they must be losing their touch.  The parcel contained most of the missing parts for my SumPod and an incomplete hotend v2.  It would be so much easier to tell with a picklist what parts are missing - at least at Ikea you know what you're supposed to have and tell what's missing (and the customer service is a lot better too).

Over the weekend I built the supplied parts into my SumPod and loaded the SumPod Sprinter firmware.  After double checking connections, I excitedly powered up the SumPod to test the three axis of motion and experienced a sinking feeling, not the light-headed, vomit inducing miss-typed dd or clicking hard drive variety, thank goodness, just a 'frustrated this should work, here we go again' feeling in anticipation of the inevitable fault finding.  The stepper motors were 'spazzing' (a well known technical term) and would turn when a finger was prodded onto pins of the Pololu driver - a fault finding technique I recommend (after discharging any static) to indicate floating pins with a little capacitive coupling.  I was concerned the Pololu drivers had been damaged having missed the tell tale 'magic smoke' while reassembling the electronics and connecting it to the SumPod.  Had rousing them from an extended slumber damaged them?  Who knows, they had been in a box on a shelf since mid October...