Burning Smell From Azteeg v1.1

[travistrue]

I really hope I didn't botch this up again... I finally got ahold of an Azteeg X5 Mini v1.1, and set it up. I ran it for a couple of seconds, and then I smelt a familiar electronics smell that my previous Azteeg made, but no smoking this time.

Here's what I did:

• I installed the heatsink on top of the board by pulling off the adhesive strip, and sticking it on top of the stepper drivers on the board. That's literally all I did. Is there any additional setup? Is there anything I should watch for there?
  
• I re-wired the power switch to the updated specs according to Wasabi's suggestion that's updated on the Instructable.
  
• I wired everything up to the new board. The stranded power wires for the heated bed were still a pain to get crammed into the wire blocks. I accomplished this by twisting the strands into a tip, and inserting the tips into their respective blocks. I switched to 14-gauge wires for the hot/ground wires between the PSU and Azteeg.

The strands in the 14-gauge wires I'm using seems thicker than the original wires I got from the eBay kit. They go into the block pretty easily though. The wires are only a few inches long, but could these wires be generating a lot of heat? Again, no smoking, but I got a burning electronics smell after a few seconds of the Azteeg being on. Could I have possibly burnt this out? Also, once I updated the wiring for the power switch, the 0/1 switch light is always on --even when in an OFF state. Is this to be expected?

Could it be my PSU settings? I've heard that some recommend running at 12V instead of 24V, but how do I know what my PSU's set to? I saw a switch for power, and it's set to 110W. Does the Azteeg's power settings need to be changed?

[3DprintedLife]

Yes after rewiring the power switch should always be lit. That happens when you pass the live line through the switch. Your PSU should be set to 110v so that is correct, but the output you can't actually change. You either have a 12V PSU or a 24V one, if you got the one from the BOM then you have a 12V. The wires being slightly smaller would only have an effect if you run too much current through, and even then it would only make the wires warm and would't affect the board. Do you have all your steppers plugged in? My guess is that one of your steppers is bad and has an internal short, so whenever it is plugged into the board it will short out the driver and kill it. If you have a multimeter, try probing the coils (2 left pins will be one coil and 2 right will be another). Other than a bad motor frying the drivers I have no idea what your problem could be, but since this happened twice my guess is it is one of your peripherals that has the problem and not the board itself.

[travistrue]

Alright, I'll check my stepper motors. If I had to guess, it's probably the extruder motor. My hot end seems to be under-extruding, even at slow print speeds (50mm/s). The nozzle spits out filament pretty well when I manually feed the filament through by hand, but the motor doesn't seem to be turning as quickly. Almost as if it's only rotating at half speed. The filament is wavy when it's laid down as if it's not extruding at a consistent rate, but more along the lines of a sine wave. As far as it not being my board, could the stepper eventually wear out the driver? Is it the driver on the board that could be fried, or is there also a driver built into the stepper motor that could be bad? I'll check the coils when I have a multimeter available. What would I be looking for though?

Also, my heated bed never worked. It'd get 0 degrees C for readings with the thermistor whether plugged in or not, but now it tells me it's always in the 180 degrees C range, but the bed is always cool to the touch. Trying to heat it seems to cause Simplify3D to become unresponsive. These readings are true even when I disconnect the thermistor.

It looks like my PSU is 12V. Here's the Amazon link of the one I bought: www.amazon.com/eTopxizu-Universal-Regulated-Switching-Computer/dp/B00D7CWSCG