Its Alive!

I recently found out that Arduino can run right off the USB without a separate power source, so that was a nice surprise. I still don't know what I'm going to use for a power supply.

I plugged in my Zyltech RAMPS and LCD display, and a few tiny LEDs came on and started blinking on the boards as the blank LCD glowed blue. I don't have the motors or anything else plugged in yet, so I can't really do anything with it. I just wanted to try flashing the firmware to see if I could.

The Marlin firmware seems to have rave reviews online, so I was planning on using that. I downloaded several different forks of the Marlin firmware, but in the end I couldn't get ANY of them to compile for one reason or another. I tried fixing some compile issues, but each one i fixed revealed more, so I gave up after half an hour. It seems Marlin wants you to have a RAMBO board if you're building a delta, but I have a RAMPS board.

So I got on the RepRap website to see what other firmwares were being actively developed, and decided to give Repetier a try.

Repetier has a really nice wizard that you can go through to set up your configuration files and then downloads the whole thing as a zip. So I think i will be going with Repetier instead of Marlin for now. Maybe I'll give Marlin another shot later some time.

I skimmed through the setup process because I will end up re-doing it anyway, downloaded it, compiled it, and hit the upload button. This was much much easier than trying to download git repos of Marlin, never knowing if I have the right branch, and so forth. At first i had driver issues but I rebooted my laptop and tried a second time.

A tiny green LED on the Arduino (well, on the RAMPS board really) began blinking furiously. It was uploading! It took a few seconds, maybe a minute, to complete the upload. Then the LCD screen sprang to life.