Today I was able to hook up all the stepper motor axes and the extruder motor to my RAMPs board.

Connecting them involved a lot of soldering which took some time because the leads of the stepper motors were too near each other that I needed to be careful that the wires didn't touch.

Once hooked up, I noticed that the Z axis was moving way more slowly than the X and Y axes. I later learned that, by default, the Z axis has a different steps per unit value. I assume that this is because the Z axis operates differently because this is where hotends are usually mounted.

After changing the settings and a lot of trial and error, I was able to finally make all motors moved from Pronterface as shown in the video below:

I'm still refining my workflow when testing the motors. This is made more complicated because I still do not use endstops. Currently what I do is that I manually move the stepper motors to their home position, power up RAMPS, and then send a home signal command. It's a bit of a pain so I will look for a better workflow in the future.

There was also one time when one axis stopped working because of the wires got loose and touched other leads. To fix this, I placed hotglue on the wires to make sure they stay in place. It's a neat hack I learned from this video.

However, I am a bit worried that the heat from the constant use of the stepper motors might melt the hotglue but we'll see. If this happens then I have no choice but to redo them and think of a better way to avoid such a thing from happening again.

I've made good progress today. My next step is I'll be hooking up the hotend and also install the extruder frame on the NEMA 17 stepper motor. Stay tuned!