Marlin won't report back and can't flash update

Mostly Printed CNC - MPCNC Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

I had the rig I built from the kit with Rambo board and dual end stops was working for a while and everything seemed good. Of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone and I hooked up a laser. The laser ran off 12v so I hooked it into the fan and used M106/7 to turn it on and off. I ran a couple simple etching jobs and all seemed well. I had the rig powered up, the laser/fan off (M107) while I worked on an etching test.

A little while passed and I tried to run an etching test, in cncjs I noticed it wasn’t responding to the Axis controls. I could insert commands at the command prompt in cncjs and the rig would respond but wasn’t getting an ack or any output back. The Axis wasn’t keeping track of location.

I tried everything and couldn’t get it working right. I reinstalled cncjs on a brand new raspberry pi. I tried flashing the latest marlin firmware but I get avrdude timeout errors.

  1. any idea what cause the problem in the first place?

  2. does this have to do with the way I hooked in the laser, and was there a better way?

  3. any idea how to get round the timeouts.

I actually had another rambo board (don’t ask why). I flashed it just fine and got back up and running but the fact that this one stopped working troubles me.

2

I think cncjs has a bug with marlin. Usually it works fine after a move is sent through the gcode window though.

3

Yeah unfortunately I am familiar with that issue and this isn’t that. I usually used a M119 command to report back the endstop status to get past the issue you are talking about. Now I type M119, hit enter, and just get a prompt without any response.

I can type a G0 X10 for example and the rig moves but the axis panel doesn’t track the movement and still shows all 0s