keep breaking arduinos

[pdrinkut]

Hey Everyone,
Here's my problem, I powered my printer on the other day and only got white squares on the lcd screen. I wasn't sure what it was so to test I loaded firmware to a spare adruino and ramps i had laying around, didn't have any issues uploading firmware and prepping the board. I hooked up the power and lcd only and had a good boot up, got the loading screen and menu just fine. I hooked up everything else and got the white squares again and a high pitch squaling noise. I connected the usb to my pc and windows and arduino ide no longer recognize the arduino board. Can anyone help please? I'm afraid of ruining another board trying to make this work.

 

[gCreate_Joshua]

I have burned out plenty of boards by simply plugging the endstop wires in backwards. Once the endstop is triggered, the 5v regulator starts to melt and screen goes white.

 

[pdrinkut]

Thanks Josh, I've got a new board coming in tomorrow, I'll be sure to check polarity on everything I plug in, this time I plan on going piece by piece and powering up between each plug in to determine were the problem is.

 

[gCreate_Joshua]

Make sure the red wire is pointing to the right and the green to the left on the electronics board. If you need anymore help, you can email support on rewiring.

 

[Jarhead]

Another culprint is the fans.
If you have an E3D hotend, the wires can be heated up to the point the insulation melts and shorts the wires.
Use a multimeter and ohm them out before plugging them in.

 

[pdrinkut]

so, got the new board, loaded the firmware, hooked up the ramps, hooked up the screen and the power plug only, powered on and same thing, get only a white screen and now windows won't recognize the board. Could it be something on the ramps board frying the ardruino? Or possibly the screen for some reason?

noticed this time around the that board was pretty hot after powering up.

 

[pdrinkut]

todays update, new arduino, new ramps, hoooked up power and screen and came back as a success! Got the boot screen and the menu!

So the difference between yesterday and today is that I noticed I still had the stepper drivers plugged in on the ramps board I was testing with yesterday. Could it be possible that my stock stepper drivers are blowing out the usb chip on the arduinos? seems like they wouldn't be related to each other, I could be wrong. Just to further test that it was stepper driver related I took the drivers out of my other printer and plugged them into my working boards and booted up and got a menu no problem.