XYZ Dark Vader Test

Last weekend, I found some time to work on my RepStrap once again! There was a problem with the Z plain. I thought it was the stepper driver board, because there was smoke coming out of it, the last time I tried running it, but it turn out it was something wrong with the stepper motor. It appeared to be seized!

I found a replacement stepper motor in an old dot matrix printer, and swapped it out. It was at that moment that my dad walked in and asked what was wrong with the previous stepper motor. I showed him it would not move, not even if you took a pliers, gripped the axle and tried turning it. My dad asked if he could open it up and take it apart, and since it was not working, I said sure, since I was curious to see what the insides of a stepper motor looked like... Once it was open, we could see the two coils. Everything looked fine. There where 2 bearings on the top and bottom of the axis. My dad thought that the problem could be a seized bearing, but they where fine... So I tried again with the pliers... and after applying some force, it began so spin like the others when you finger-turn them...

So I hooked it back up and tested it... and it worked... I found the test code for the steppers on the reprap site and burned it to the arduino... I had to comment out some code... like PSU stuff, and the stuff for the enable pins... I will post my code, but here is the link to the original for now: http://reprap.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/reprap/trunk/reprap/firmware/Sanguino/Sanguino3G/testers/imperial_stepper/imperial_stepper.pde

Here is the result!