Hi all, thanks for the advice so far. I built a cable, fairly straightforward I thought....then I get the error message Please check main extruder cable and restart printer. checked everything and tried again. Same error message. So I thought maybe I did not get a good connection on the plugs, so I carefully cut them off and crimped new plugs on the cable. Same error message. Any thoughts?
So, I just had a relatively new extruder ribbon cable die on me. Instead of buying a new $30 cable, I tried making my own using a 20pin IDC cable, and ran right into the same problem you did.
After messing around with this for the past two days, I've come up with a working solution. As it turns out, the m200's cable is a little unusual. With typical cables, you'd expect the pin layouts to be exactly the same at both ends of the cable. However, for the stock m200 cable, the pin rows are reversed!
What I mean is, if at end of the cable, pin layout is like this:
---
---| |------
| 1 2 3 ... |
| 4 5 6 ... |
------------
At the other end of the cable, the layout would look like this:
---
---| |------
| 4 5 6 ... |
| 1 2 3 ... |
------------
This means, if you were trying to simply extend the length of the stock cable, or add something in the middle, as shown in Julia's posted picture, you can simply make sure pin 1 lines up with pin 1. But, if you're trying to replace the stock cable entirely, connecting the control board directly to the extruder breakout PCB board, you will have to cobble together something that reverses the pinout rows.
I've attached a picture of the little adaptor I kludged together. One end is two rows of jumper wires stuffed in 10 pin connector housings. The other end is plugged into the IDC cable with the rows reversed. I haven't put in any print time with this yet, but I was able to power up, load, and unload filament without issue.
Hope this info will be useful to somebody out there!
