Troubleshooting

General

The object printed not in circle or round

• Pulley loose on the motor shaft?
  Put a small flat on the shaft
• Giving the stepper more torqued
• Filament dragging on the head. 
• Too little motor current.

Extruder

Extruder not moving
You need the skeinforge -> dimension module loaded to generate E codes, which drive the extruder.

Heater not heating when raft module disabled
The raft module also controls preheating. To stop printing rafts, simply set the layer-counts in the raft module to 0, rather than disabling it.


Motors

Motors make significant noise.
This generally means you have too much current.

Motor vibrates on the spot.
This generally means that you don't have sufficient current to the motors.

A motor vibrates but does not turn
Adjust current setting resistor and/or decrease motor speed

A motor turn forward but not backward
Connect the end-stop and the motor will go both ways. When the end-stops are NOT connected, the board reads them as being in the home position.

The motor move on wrong direction
It is possible to reverse the direction of the motors by

1. changing the sequence of the wiring. By replacing the 4-wire 1-2-3-4 order with 4-3-2-1 the motor will turn clockwise when they previously did counter clockwise and vice versa
   OR
2. 'Inverting axis direction' at firmware configuration.h file. Changing the INVERT_X_DIR (substitute Y, Z as needed) by changing it from true(1) to false(0) or back. 

Axis movement pauses momentarily and then resumes.

• You may have too much current going to the motor which is causing the pololu to over-heat. Reduce the current.
• Try increasing the baud rate setting BAUDRATE(Configuration.h) to 115200 or 250000

Note: This can also be caused by firmware but check your motors first.

How to reduce or increase motor current
Each Pololu has a trimpot located next to the heatsink. The trimpot controls the current that is sent to each motor. Turning the trimpot counter-clockwise reduces the current to the motor, turning it clockwise increases the current to the motor.

Start by adjusting the trimpot down until your motor vibrates on the spot rather than turning cleanly. Now turn the trimpot in a clockwise direction in small increments (1 eighth of a turn) until the motors just start running. Then give the trim port a final turn of about 1 eighth of a turn and your should be good to go.

• Generation 6 Electronics