"Turning on" a Printrboard

[IPrintThereforeIAm]

Hello everyone,

I have a Rev. F5 printrboard that will not turn on when plugged into power (12V PSU). By "turn on", I mean no LED powers on to confirm that the board is receiving power. Additionally, when plugged into USB, it is not recognized as a device by my computer. I'm running Cura on windows 7, which has no problems when plugging in a Rev. D board. The PSU definitely works, so I have a feeling that the printrboard needs some sort of input to get started.

Any ideas on what I'm not doing, or doing wrong?

A little background: I had an F5 board previously with the same issue, and I was convinced that some portion of the board was fried. I went as far as to have the 5V converter board on it replaced! . I ended up buying a refurbished board from Printrbot, but I was met with the same problem. I may have wasted some of my money here!

[cbxbiker61]

Was the Rev D using the same power supply? It may be that you don't realize that the ATX power supply has to have a jumper on the big 24 pin connector to be used in a "dumb" always on mode.

The pins on the 24 pin connector are quite big and the most reliable way of jumpering the switch pins is to buy a jumper plug from Amazon. These jumper plugs are used all the time for bitcoin mining.

You can usually tell if the ATX power supply is truly on by looking for fan rotation.

[IPrintThereforeIAm]

cvbiker61, you just solved all of my problems. Both my old, supposedly broken and new rev F5 boards work just fine. Thank you so much!!!!

Time to sell one of the boards, buy a jumper to replace the bent paper clip I just used, and convert to Buddhism.

[RetireeJay]

Yes, what cbxbiker61 said.
Printrbot has a picture of the connector . You can actually use a paper clip to jumper the pins - that's fine. It's the only green wire on the connector, and you jumper it to any black wire.

And I see you got it figured out! I'm sorry I didn't think of that on the first go-round!

[Mooselake]

Keep the other board as a spare.

ATX supplies are cheap,but not necessarily the best way to power non-ATX gear. I use a 12V 30A (aka 29A) switching supply similar to one picked at random.

Digital (another random pick, Amazon has some but at 10x the price) are amazingly cheap. Besides letting you know that you have power you can also use it to adjust the voltage with the bed and hot end powered up so you get 12V under full load; it'll make a difference, possibly a big one, in how fast your bed gets up to temperature. Plus, with that 30 Amper you won't need to worry about power. I cut the connector off an ATX supply from the local computer store's trash can to use on the board, just wire all the same colored wires together and use the black one for the - connection.

Kirk