TAZ 5 Help - Extruders not working

General LulzBot TAZ
1

I received a TAZ 5 last year as a donation to my classroom. It had been working fine until about a month ago when I fried the board. Does anyone know of an idiot proof method to get it back to working properly? Everything seems to be working except for the extruders. Any help would be appreciated. Videos would probably help more than written instructions.

Thanks

2

Extruder not working is a really broad problem. Especially when people commonly refer to the entire toolhead as the extruder.

I assume you replaced the main control board already?

If so, what part isn’t working? Not heating? No temp signal? Motor not turning? Error when trying to heat?

Likewise with your message - videos of what is happening would be helpful.

3

The motors aren’t moving. The heat is there, but the extruder isn’t moving any filament.

4

How much heat? The firmware won’t let the extruder move until its something like 170c at a minimum. 200c is a good target before attempting movement.

Does the extruder stepper motor turn with a consistent resistance if you turn it by hand with disconnected from the board? if it’s been fried, it will usually feel harder to turn somewhere in the rotation. If a dead motor fried the board, or the other way around, you could have ruined the new board as well.

Use a known good motor (X axis motor can be connected to the extruder motor wires fairly easily) to see if it moves when you try to move the extruder after temp is up. I wouldn’t recommend doing the extruder to the X axis initially, in case the motor is killing stepper drivers. Motors are much cheaper to replace in case the extruder stepper driver kills the motor.

6

The motors aren’t moving. The heat is there, but the extruder isn’t moving any filament.

7

^ if we’re just repeating ourselves here, this isn’t going to get very far.

8

Thanks! I was able to figure that out after I sent my last reply and after I was able to get the hot ends to finally heat up correctly (I had some wires crossed). I do appreciate your help! With it being an older machine, I wasn’t sure I would get any responses, let alone one on the same day.

Thanks!