After finishing wiring my Smoothie Board to my printer, I wanted to test a part of my start gcode: G21, G90, M107, G1 Z10 F300. I copied down these commands from my slicer which I now realize has a typo (the line G1 Z10 F300 was missing the F). So I think I gave it this command: G1 Z10 300 by accident. After giving it this GCODE, the x-axis motor driver caught on fire for a second before I unplugged everything. I’m not sure what caused it to catch on fire (whether it was misspelled gcode or if when I moved the x-axis by hand earlier, the motor created too much current for the driver).
Another thing worth mentioning is that this is my second smoothieboard that has had a driver catch on fire (the first one happened randomly when I started a print, also my first smoothieboard ran perfectly well for almost a year.)
Two questions: Why do you think my drivers keep burning out? Will the board still work if I replace the driver?
Could you please give me a picture of the entire board?
Another thing worth mentioning is that this is my second smoothieboard that has had a driver catch on fire
That’s crazy. Just to give you an idea, I don’t think I’ve gotten a single customer with a burnt driver this year. Might even not have gotten one at all last year. Maybe one.
So this is crazy rare, twice is unheard of. I think this is really going to be able determining what is special about where you are/you/your machine that keeps causing this. This is extremely odd.
It’s definitely not you sending the wrong command. You might have burnt the driver by moving it by hand, then when you asked it to move Z it powered up all drivers including X ( that’s normal ), and X burnt up as soon as powered because it was pre-damaged by the manual movement.
That’s my leading hypothesis, but TWO TIMES? That’s very very strange.
I’m almost certain my old board’s driver burned because I was moving the x-axis back and forth fast to try and find why my linear bearing was making a weird noise. (At the time I didn’t realize there wasn’t protection for the driver when manually spinning the motors.) This time around, I was moving the x-axis a little bit because the bearing felt messed up, but then I realized I was actually feeling the motor resisting movement.
Both of these boards are used and I got them from a friend, so he might have been the one who broke the drivers. Another thing worth mentioning is that I was using octoprint to move the tool head in all directions before the driver caught on fire.
If the rest of the board looks ok to you, then I will take one of the working drivers off of the old board and solder it to the new one.
A friend helped me take off the burnt driver and put a new one on. The pad that was closest to the burn was not in great shape, but we did our best to make it work. Upon powering the board and testing it with octoprint, the board turned on correctly and the driver did not catch on fire. The x-axis did not move when I gave it the command, the other axis all worked okay. I think I am going to try to wire an external driver I have. If that doesn’t work then I will buy a new board.
I think that soldering wires to the tabs on the smoothie board is a recipe for disaster. Not sure that’s what has caused the problems discussed but I have used header pins and wired up miniplugs for all my smothieboard connections. Looks nicer and helps with fault chasing if something goes wrong. I have fairly big stepper motors so I drive with TB6600 external drivers. If there is then some external driver screw up, I knock out a cheap Ebay product rather than the main comparatively expensive board.