MakerBot Industries

Thanks for the advice. After a little swapping of boards and motors, I found the problem (with the x-axis) was actually in the connection between my cable from the mother board and the x-axis port. Now I have control over each axis, and the head gets hot, but I still have a problem with the connection dropping out.

May I ask, how does one go about checking the baud rates? What are they supposed to be?
Many thanks for your help.

The FTDI drivers emulate serial ports through USB so they show up as COM ports. Sometimes configurations are mismatched in terms of speed ( baudrates) or protocols (for instance 8 bits, no parity, even bits as the normal protocol to communicate with Arduinos).

You can check it in the Windows control panel under System (hardware tab) com ports properties and the see if they match those required by motherboard. It may be along shot but at least removes one possible issue.

Also try connecting into different USB ports in the computer and see if the problem is still there. Every port connection sets up the plug&play process and that may address the issues on the present port.

After further tests, I have figured out that I only run into these problems when the heated extruder board is connected to the motherboard. I can have the motherboard plugged in all day without problems if the extruder board isn't plugged in, but if it is, and you try to do something like just heat up the head, it will heat briefly then just drop out. The extruder feed motor also doesn't work (at all), so at this point I'm inclined to think that the extruder board is probably the culprit in my difficulties.

I am not that familiar with the Cupcake extruder board. If it resembles something like this you:

http://www.neufeld.newton.ks.us/electronics/?p=551

You should be able to install the appropriate firmware using this method:

http://wiki.makerbot.com/plastruder-firmware-update

I have seen a lot of people struggling with upgrading the firmware on TOM and different generation electronics on Cupcakes so this is a challenging scenario at best, if the easy things have been eliminated (bad contacts and wrong connections).

You may also have a defective board, though rare they do come up every once in a while.

You make get better visibility by starting a new thread to deal with this very specific issue. Be very clear on the title like "Unresponsive Cupcake Extruder Gen X Board" where X is the number - likely a 3 or less. Remember to list the equipment and the software versions you are using and the symptoms you are seeing. There are lot of Cupcake users out there that can help.