Extruder drive wont work

[phanc60844 0]

I recently had some problems with comms on my machine and found that I had a dodgy main board. After changing that out I found that all of the axes would work with the job function except the extruder. So I pulled the plug on the extruder, put it on the Z axis output and it ran when jogging the Z axis. I swapped over the extruder stepdriver to the Z axis and again it worked. So no dead motor or step driver. At this point I raised a help ticket. However I continued to try other things. I downloaded the latest version of Cura and tried to download the latest firmware. However I couldnt get any comms ,very strange I thought. I disconected the arduino from the mainboard and tried to download ,it worked this time. So I reconnected the arduino, and ran the first run wizard and it worked. I then tried the jog function on the extruder and it worked!!!!!

I just thought I'd share this with you as I was close to chucking the thing in the bin! Just on another note, is it posible to run a print with Cura whilst monitoring the program within the arduino via the arduino programming software? in my case I could have monitored the extruder stedriver output whilst using the jogging function and I would have picked up straight away that it was a Cura issue .Its the sort of thing I do at work with machinery in trying to fault find but I dont know how 2 programs using the same USB cable comunicating with the arduino would work together.

Paul