My PrintrBot Simple seems dead. The light is on, but the steppers are not energizing. So close and yet so far. I have installed the Repetier software, and in the manual control section, it is not responding to any x/y/z movement inputs. The log file is showing a valid temperature reading from the print head (if I hold the end, the temperature creeps up).
Am I missing something obvious?
When you say manual inputs do you mean the [10] [100] buttons in the print panel? How about [home all]
It’s working now. After some button mashing, it started behaving. I think I had 2 problems.
It wasn’t homed properly - took me a few minutes to realize those squares with triangles on top were houses - what can I say, I’m Canadian and live in an igloo 
Because it thought it was ‘homed’, it would not move in the negative direction. And given where the head was, I did not want to move in the positive direction.
Ah, I have had this happen after manually moving the build platform on my Prusa i3.
@Alex_Wiebe Can you describe how you did home it properly in the end? I’m having other problems but I confess that I’m not confident that I have homed mine.
It’s not obvious. Connect, then press the OK button to clear the stacked commands. You should then have control.
@Raymond_Blum Homing turned out fairly simple for me. Looking at the X / Y axis, they appeared “safe” and so I clicked the Home X & Home Y buttons (I’m using Repetier-Host software).
The Z axis is more scary. The instructions do not say how to far to set the screw, so I turned it all the way down.
Then I pressed the Z-Axis home button. It stopped a couple cm above the plate.
I then backed the screwed out a few turns and pressed the Z-Axis home button. I kept repeating this until the head got close to the table. At that point I put a piece of paper between the head & table and continued the process but using smaller turns of the screw until the paper was catching but not stuck. I then back the screw out a 1/2 turn.
To level the bed, I left the Z-axis at the home position, and jogged the X / Y 10mm at a time around the square, keeping the paper between the head & table. After each jog I made the paper was touching but free.
Fortunately, my table was very level, so I did not have to adjust the screws, but had the paper started binding or getting too loose, I would have adjusted the closest screw until the tension was back.
When leveling the bed, it also helps to print out something large and flat like One Small Step - http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:266725 - which happens to prints at about the full print area on a stock Printrbot Simple. See if the skirt disappears at any point, and that’ll tell you where the bed needs to be leveled.