Against better advice from this blog post http://dustsreprap.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/ramps-fd.html I ordered a teensylu from geeetech (currently tenovo2010 on ebay). It was very cheap ($35) and I was curious to see if their standards have improved, in short; no.
The board is dirty as in the blog, the pins are indeed all wonky again. Some of my components are a little corroded (connectors and reset button). The soldering quality is dire as you can see from the photos. The worst offence is an incomplete and maybe dry joint on the bed heater pin, so it’s also a fire hazard as it stands now. But on the plus side it did come with a little bag of jumpers. There was a QC sticker which I removed to check the traces underneath as I saw some copper missing from parts of the ground plane.
I’ve contacted them with the photos so we’ll see how they react, I have no intention of returning the board as the shipping is not worth it, so I’m going to start repairing the defects myself now.
Wow…speechless. It’s like a training example for everything you shouldn’t do when soldering…insufficient solder, excessive solder, cold joints. How the f%#! does someone do just about everything you can do wrong on one board?
Finally got it programmed with Marlin, the reset switch has a dry joint and does nothing. Manually shorting reset to ground with a keyring I found I could get it into the Atmel LUFA CDC bootloader, then program the sketch using “sudo avrdude -P /dev/ttyACM0 -p at90usb1286 -c avr109 -U Marlin.cpp.hex” And I hated Teensy before (have a Teensy++ 2.0 which is equally bad).
Yup. Welcome to Geeetech. People who just grab almost any design of anything off the net, assemble it and put it up for sale. Testing? That would imply they even know what the device is. Sometimes they do, but really, I doubt that they do any at all. I think the only “QA” they do is confirm that all the components are on the board and that nothing has actually fallen off yet.
PS: I helped bobc with RAMPS-FD. Geeetech jumped the gun and started producing the first rev of the board, now known as V1, which has inverted heater outputs making it almost unusable with some firmware (our mistake, but we’d not even finished assembling the prototypes before they started on production). They also put PTC fuses on it instead of real fuse holders (which they supposedly corrected after I contacted them). Seems they’ll substitute whatever they can to get something out the door. sigh
It still has the (nur) heart. That makes me smile.
The teensylu is an outdated design, and I really need to update the BOM and some other things.
do yourself a favor, while touching up the mosfets, add an extra wire from the mosfet output pin to the switched pin for the heated bed connector. The board should really be made from 2oz-in copper instead of 1oz-in to handle the high current. It’s the heated bed that is the problem, so it’s better to add some extra current carrying capacity.
dont feel bad I ordered their ultimaker board 1.5.7 and resoldered every joint on the board and even had to solder bridge some gaps. made me laugh a little when i saw green green written on the board next to 2 red leds lol.
Ok, i’m officially reverting my opinion about @geeetech . While the pololus i got on sale were near-perfect quality, these pictures make me think that my order was a lucky draw.
Dear *******,
Sincerely sorry to hear that. I think our manufacturing and testing department made the mistake. I wonder if you can take it to repair. And we will give you some discount when you make the deal next time. We really sorry to let you so inconvenient. Thank you for your understanding.
Update, the board is dead. It can run blink and one of the Serial Example sketches, but Marlin will never appear as a USB device. The very same Marlin.cpp.hex file will run on an actual Teensy 2.0++ I have. The code on the Teensylu verifies ok, even after power cycle. Putting a loop at the top of Marlin’s setup() which just enables serial and prints stuff also fails to appear as a USB device. It’s one of the strangest failure modes I’ve ever seen.
@Stephanie_A do you know anyone selling a good Printrboard with the screw terminals? My bed is too much for Molex pins. Or a good printrboard I can swap the pins out on?
Marlin won’t run on the ARM series boards (Arduino Due) at all. AFAIK, the core people behind Marlin are interested in the Due, but they are all agreed that porting Marlin to it is a waste of effort (due to the amount of AVR specific code and shortcuts in Marlin). They’re all instead helping on other projects to put firmware on the ARM platform, like Smoothieware, etc.
The only thing that I know of that should work at the moment is the Repieter firmware.
Note: Bobc dropped off the face of the earth after an argument on the RepRap forums (not with me), and as he was the major force behind the RAMPS-FD project, it’s pretty much dead in the water. The V1 board has issues (heater lines inverted, so that if your Due fails somehow, the hot end/heated bed will be on by default), and V2 never made it to a final revision (though what is in github might be usable, but it’s not tested). I myself do not have the time to work on it without major help, so from my point of view I’m officially declaring this project dead.
@Bracken_Dawson i replaced the heat bed connectors with 18 gauge wires, 3 per side. I used an old 6 pin molex connector on that. For the mains power supply, I would do something similar, probably one of those 8 pin connectors from an old pc power supply. Also beef up the traces running from the connector on the board by adding additional wires. You’ll need to look at the schematics to get it right. You could also remove the mosfet, run a wire from the pad on it and move the entire circuit off the board and run from a separate supply.
New info, the teensylu has (apparently) the LUFA CDC bootloader, but the fuses are l:5e h:99 e:f3. This is impossible, the CDC bootloader wont fit in that BOOTSZ size. So to work at all it must have been programmed with some hacked up light CDC bootloader. Or it has the CDC bootloader half over-written with Marlin and a bodged Boot reset address to make it work with those fuses. Either way I want nothing to do with it, I’m going to grab my atmel programmer from the space and put the Atmel DFU bootloader back on it.
