It seems, upon further inspection, the kit that I bought off of ebay containing

• 3 stepper motors
• a mega256 arduino clone
• a ramps 1.4 clone
• 3 end stops
• a NTC for a printer bed
• 5 DRV8825 stepper motor drivers

is not actually set up to run off of 12V or the ramps board is so clone/fake that the wiring on the board is wrong and the system is not driven correctly.

When I run the stepper motors at very low speeds the steppers seem to miss steps. This blog analyzed the problem and found a rather interesting solution to the issue that the driver does not seem capable of driving low voltage motors at high voltage and low current. It seems to miss microsteps and it seems the results are pretty bad. I have a similar problem running at such low speeds even though it will no influence me as much. I also tested the good old A4988 driver in my board and to my big surprise it produced a very similar missed microsteps pattern even though the same driver works perfectly fine in my laser cutter on my own control board at random speeds.

I have yet to identify the actual problem because it seems unlikely that Pololu would release a driver chip that is essentially unusable at low speeds.

Does anyone have any ideas and solutions regarding this problem?